Category: The Christian Spirit

Reflections on living as a disciple of Christ.

Lewis: When Progress Is Not Really Progress

  

I think the words “progress” and “progressive” have been terribly abused in our day. The latter has been captured by the Left of the political spectrum and is now used for anything that gets the government more involved in our lives, as if that should automatically be considered progress. C. S. Lewis wrote about progress in a much more reflective vein. For instance, in his essay, “Is Progress Possible” (which has as a subtitle “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”),… Read more »

Lewis: The Spiritual vs. the Ritual

  

The sacred vs the secular; the substance vs. the external; the spiritual vs. the ritual. We deal with this tension all our lives. I question whether anything is truly secular. After all, the world and everything in it comes from the hand of God. What makes it secular is when we remove Him from his creation. We focus a lot on externals and rituals, sometimes allowing them to substitute for the truly substantive and spiritual. When we do that, even… Read more »

Lewis: The Mere Christian Message

  

On this Good Friday/Easter weekend, the Christian message of sacrificial death and resurrection may be brought more to the forefront of minds that normally think little of such things. The message is the same at all times, but this weekend sharpens the focus. To the natural mind, death is finality. There is no comprehension of how it can be of any good. Yet C. S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, shows us how: On the one hand Death is the… Read more »

Today Is For Remembering the Sacrifice

  

Death. We don’t like the word, and for good reason. Death was never supposed to be a fact of life. It was nowhere in God’s original purpose for His creation. It came about through rebellion against His love. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus even though He knew He was going to bring him back to life. Why? Because death is unnatural, a disruption of the good God intended. On Good Friday, Jesus took the first step in reversing… Read more »

Chambers: The Meaning of Witness

  

Every couple of years, I’m privileged to teach my course on Whittaker Chambers. As this semester nears its end, students are also getting near the end of Chambers’s masterful autobiography entitled Witness. Why that title? Chambers, as he shared what he knew about the communist underground of which he had been a part for many years, was a witness. Another word for a witness is a martyr—one who is willing to lay down his life for what he knows to… Read more »

The Joys (?) of Grading

  

I am a professor of history. I live, eat, drink, and breathe my profession. I see it as a calling from God. He provided His Word and the principles from His Word to guide me into my thinking about history, government, culture, and anything associated with those subjects. I love teaching. I love reading/researching. I’ve even learned to love writing, which is the hardest of those loves to carry out effectively. Yet the love of God and His truths is… Read more »

Lewis: Humility & the Literary

  

C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism is a surprisingly good read. I say “surprisingly” because I expected a heavy tome that would be hard to understand. It isn’t that at all. I drew from it in my previous Lewis post, showing how he clearly differentiates between the unliterary and the literary. He notes that the majority of people fall into the first category. A false implication can arise from that division. People may think Lewis is being a snob…. Read more »