Category: Book Reviews

Modernity & the Church

  

I’m working my way through a new book by Os Guinness called Impossible People: Christian Courage and the Struggle for the Soul of Civilization. It diagnoses the problem of the church as it becomes co-opted by modernity. Guinness says, quite correctly, I believe, that it’s not the frontal attacks of secularism and atheism that do the real damage; rather, it is the seduction and distortion of the faith through modernity that leads us astray and destroys the Christian witness to… Read more »

Looking for Some Good Reads?

  

I have some book reviews for you today. I’ve been expanding my reading of books about C. S. Lewis. Some of my earliest reading of Lewis was his Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. I’ve been aware of David Downing’s analysis of these novels, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, for quite some time; I finally got around to reading it. Every Lewis fan has a favorite in… Read more »

America Discovers C. S . Lewis

  

My year-long sabbatical in 2014-2015 will soon pay off. The manuscript for my book on C. S. Lewis is now in the hands of the publisher and I’ve secured the Lewis Company’s permission to quote from Lewis sources. I’d like to give you an overview of what to expect in this book. The revised title is America Discovers C. S. Lewis: His Profound Impact. Chapter one looks at the relationship between Lewis and America. What was his attitude toward Americans… Read more »

“The Witness & the President” Comes to the Reagan Ranch Center

  

My book, The Witness and the President: Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan, and the Future of Freedom, has been out now since early November. I’ve had the opportunity to speak about it before a number of groups locally. It documents the impact Chambers had on Reagan as the latter read Chambers’s masterful autobiography, Witness. Chambers helped Reagan understand why people would be attracted to communism, and spurred him on to take on communism, which ultimately led to the breakup of the… Read more »

Introduction to Chambers-Reagan

  

For those of you who have been thinking about buying my new book on Ronald Reagan and Whittaker Chambers, yet haven’t quite made the commitment, let me provide you with an excerpt from my introduction: Any author should ask himself certain questions before attempting to write a book. Some immediately come to mind when considering the topic of this book: Are there not enough books on Ronald Reagan? Why add another one to the ever-increasing supply? Why focus on Whittaker… Read more »

C. S. Lewis’s Joy

  

Joy Davidman Lewis, American wife of C. S. Lewis for the last few years of her short life, has been a subject of both great interest and great controversy for those who love Lewis and his writings. Born a New York Jew, Joy early decided she was an atheist and then completed that portion of her journey as a committed communist. She was fairly well known as a poet in her own right, particularly in the circles in which she… Read more »

Women & C. S. Lewis

  

Clyde Kilby, the man largely responsible for the largest C. S. Lewis repository in America—the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College—wrote an article in December 1953 detailing his personal meeting with Lewis at Oxford. Before he got to Lewis’s rooms, he wrote, someone led him astray about the nature of the man he was going to meet. Kilby’s wife was accompanying him, and he asked at the college gate “whether there was anything to the report that Mr. Lewis… Read more »