Category: The Christian Spirit

Reflections on living as a disciple of Christ.

Principles vs. Pragmatism

  

I chose the title “Pondering Principles” for my website because I believe that we are called by God to be principled people. I’ve taught hundreds of students the distinction between being principled and being pragmatic. Definitions are essential. Here’s how I have explained what it means to be principled. Principles are what I would call the “big truths” out of which other truths naturally should flow. Truth must be our foundation for all things, and we must not give only… Read more »

Solidifying the Faith of Mere Christians

  

I’ve finished three weeks of my university course on C. S. Lewis and enjoyed every minute of it. We began by going through his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, which I can tell was well received by the students. We have now begun key chapters in Mere Christianity and carefully analyzed and discussed Books I and II, which provide the basis for building an apologetic for the faith. As I read my students’ reading reports on the assigned chapters, I see… Read more »

Lewis in Romania: Remembered

  

I look back to where I was one year ago this week and fondly recall some truly precious days in Romania attending a C. S. Lewis conference. It was a blessing to spend time with kindred spirits who love the Lord and who appreciate writers like Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald, and others who point readers to the ancient truths that are actually timeless. I was asked to speak at the very first panel of the conference, a distinct pleasure and a… Read more »

“The Mind of the Maker”: Lewis on Sayers–Part 3

  

This is will be my third and final look at connections I see between C. S. Lewis’s thoughts and what Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in her valuable work, The Mind of the Maker. Chapter eight is appropriately entitled “Pentecost,” as it focuses on the power of words to move men. Lewis was a dedicated wordsmith who knew that the right words used at the right time in just the right way, could spark the imagination and jumpstart the mind. Sayers… Read more »

“The Mind of the Maker”: Lewis on Sayers–Part 2

  

In a previous post, I showed how C. S. Lewis praised Dorothy L. Sayers’s book, The Mind of the Maker, and offered one example. I would like to add to that today with some similarities I see between what Lewis wrote in some of his works and what Sayers wrote in her book. Chapter three, “Idea, Energy, and Power,” develops Sayers’s thesis by showing how any completed work in life starts with an idea in the mind. This correlates nicely… Read more »

Conniving with Evil

  

I’m constantly re-reading C. S. Lewis books. It had been a while since I read his Reflections on the Psalms, so I took it down from the shelf and gave it another go. This time, as is always the case, something stood out to me that didn’t, to the same extent, in my previous reading. The chapter title “Connivance” leaped off the pages into my world—at least, the world I constantly experience around me, particularly with respect to government and… Read more »

Longing & Beauty in “Till We Have Faces”

  

As I noted in my previous post, my re-reading of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces has brought me face-to-face—so to speak—with the value of the book in ways I hadn’t fully appreciated in my first two readings of it. This novel based on the Greek tale of Cupid and Psyche didn’t attract me at first. One reason probably was due to my lack of interest in pagan myths. The other reason was that I had no knowledge of… Read more »