Reflections on God … Man … Life
Doors open, and when the Lord is the One who opens the door, we should enter in to what He has for us. That’s how I looked upon the opportunity to go to Romania and participate in the C. S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits Conference this past week. The theme of the conference was “The Re-Enchanted Academic,” and I was pleased to offer a presentation in the very first panel. That’s me—second from the right, in preparation for the presentation…. Read more »
Out of all of C. S. Lewis’s superb essays, two stand out to me. As with many others, I am enthralled by his war-time sermon (turned into an essay) “The Weight of Glory.” It is Lewis at his highest peak of wordsmithing. The other one that has always captured my attention is “Learning in War-time,” which, like “The Weight of Glory,” was a war-time sermon that became an essay. The question raised in the sermon/essay is whether, during a time… Read more »
I have spent countless hours combing through C. S. Lewis’s essays in preparation for a course on those essays that I will teach beginning in January. I’m not complaining about the time I have spent: just the opposite. I can hardly imagine how time can be better spent. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been sharing key thoughts from some of those essays. Here’s another one I want to focus on today. My study of other writers that Lewis… Read more »
In his early Christian days, C. S. Lewis disagreed rather strongly with the poetry of T. S. Eliot. He was particularly unimpressed and dismayed by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Over time, however, a mutual respect developed when they labored together on the Revised Psalter of the Church of England. I’ve recently been reading an interesting book of excerpts from various writers that Lewis admired, or at least respected. The book is titled From the Library of C. S. Lewis: Selections… Read more »
As I prepared my course on C. S. Lewis’s many essays, one of my choices (because there are so many excellent possibilities and limited time) was an essay that I hadn’t recalled previously. I selected it because it goes to the very heart of Christian faith. While this might seem matter of fact to some, and certainly not a controversy among Christians, the world has many different views about Jesus. It’s also good to remind Christians of the uniqueness of… Read more »
C. S. Lewis did not live in an ivory tower separated from the world. He knew what people were going through and how they thought. During WWI, he was in the trenches with every social class in British society. When WWII erupted, he spoke to RAF pilots—those who might not come back from their next mission. As he interacted with all types of people, he came to some sobering conclusions about them and how to reach them for the Gospel…. Read more »
How does one survey the vast number of essays C. S. Lewis wrote and pare them down to the twenty-or-so most essential ones? The problem arose for me as I prepared a course to teach at my church–slated for the January-April Parish Academy session. I earnestly desired to include his excellent thoughts in “Historicism,” but that essay is so prominent in my upcoming book (and the course I will develop based on that book), that I chose to exclude it… Read more »