Reflections on God … Man … Life
Dorothy L. Sayers was a “find” for me in just the last few years. Once I realized she and C. S. Lewis were friends and that he loved her BBC radio plays titled The Man Born to Be King, I knew I had to be better acquainted with her writings. I read all of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, luxuriated in The Mind of the Maker, devoted myself to the book version of the radio plays (with her marvelous introduction),… Read more »
Evangelical is a good word. It comes from “evangel,” which means “good news.” For Christians, an evangelical is someone who declares the Good News that God so loved the world that He gave His Son, Jesus, to lead us out of sin and back into relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So it’s a truly good word. Yet, like all good words, it can be maligned. To many outside the Christian faith, being an evangelical is now looked… Read more »
C. S. Lewis was not a person who enjoyed political arguments. That distaste went back to his home life in Belfast as his father and guests to the home would enter into such arguments. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t think about good governance and the Christian’s role in that governance. His most direct and detailed commentary on how Christians should approach politics is found in an essay he wrote for the Anglican newspaper, The Guardian, in 1941: “Meditation on… Read more »
How does one rank C. S. Lewis’s essays? Which ones are the best and why? Just as with his books, answers will differ depending on one’s personal history, the baggage one must deal with, and the bent of one’s intellectual curiosity. Those all come together for me in appreciation for “The Inner Ring,” which was a lecture Lewis gave to King’s College, in the University of London, in 1944. What is an Inner Ring? It’s a group that one perceives… Read more »
January 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol, was not a protest by American constitutional conservatives. American constitutional conservatives do not storm the Capitol building in an attempt to stop the counting of electoral votes in an election that was certified by all fifty states, both Republican and Democrat, to be a reliable vote count. American constitutional conservatism does not reject the decisions of courts, both state and local, that ruled on the multitude of cases that sought to overturn… Read more »
On this day fifty-seven years ago, C. S. Lewis died. As many have noted since, his death went relatively unnoticed at the time due to the tragic assassination of President Kennedy that same day. Yet, I ask, which of those two lives had more influence for the Kingdom of God? Which man, through his words and example, has led more people to seriously consider spiritual realities? Walter Hooper first met Lewis in the summer of 1963. They had corresponded over… Read more »
This past week in my C. S. Lewis course, we have been discussing The Screwtape Letters. Every time I return to these letters, I see greater depth than before, and for some of my students, this is their first foray into the infernal world Lewis created to highlight Christian truth in an unusual way. The letters themselves obviously are the focus as we discuss, but I started by reading to them from his preface to the 1961 edition, which came… Read more »