Reflections on God … Man … Life
Fifty-six years ago yesterday, C. S. Lewis changed his place of residence. He left this vale of tears for the eternal home he had always longed for and which he wrote about so eloquently, particularly in The Great Divorce and in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory.” He had fallen into a coma in July of 1963 and everyone thought those were to be his final moments. He surprised them by waking up and asking for some tea. He hadn’t… Read more »
“The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne’s question ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ is equally relevant.” We live so much in the “present” that we often neglect what we say we believe about the transitory nature of this world. We have an eternity that awaits us, yet… Read more »
My students finished reading C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters this week. The final letter includes one of the most profound insights Lewis has ever offered as to what happens when a Christian dies. Even though it is described through the eyes of a demon (or perhaps because it is described in that way), one can get a glimpse of the glory that awaits those who have found the narrow path and remained faithful. Wormwood’s “patient” has died in a… Read more »
Pastor Robert Jeffress is one of Donald Trump’s most fervent evangelical defenders. He has recently tweeted the following: “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” What bothers me about this tweet is the exaltation of a man to the point that removing him from office would be tantamount to the kind of division… Read more »
This has been a dismal political season. And the real campaign doesn’t begin until a year from now. Frankly, I don’t look forward to it. Democrat presidential candidates continue their march into Far-Left Oblivion as they promote policies that even most Democrats reject. They remain particularly strident on abortion, even to the point of birth—and, in some cases, even after birth. On the one hand, they will talk about the how much they care for people that they want to… Read more »
I’m teaching my C. S. Lewis course at my university again this semester. The students began their Lewis reading with Surprised by Joy, his insightful autobiography. We are now focused on Mere Christianity and discussing the significance of that book. Every time I come back to it, I’m deeply impressed all over again, and I always seem to find nuggets of truth and wisdom that stand out more clearly than in my previous reading. This time I was struck particularly… Read more »
All summer I worked on developing courses on C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In one sense, it was labor, but some labors provide spiritual satisfaction. This was one of those labors. I’m now presenting the fruit of that labor to a room of seventy people at my church who seem eager to learn what Lewis has given us in these presumably “children’s” tales. What they are discovering, I trust, is that they are just as meaningful to adults. I’m… Read more »