Reflections on God … Man … Life
Reflections on living as a disciple of Christ.
There are days when I don’t want to write a blog. There are days when I wonder why any of us care to try to make a difference in this world. There are days when I am so sick of the hypocrisy in our culture that I have to fight cynicism in my own heart. There are days when racial wranglings and the bitterness and resentments that flow from them make me ill. There are days when I despair that… Read more »
In my ongoing American history series, I’ve completed three posts on the First Great Awakening. They have highlighted the people whom God used to bring an awakening to colonial America. William and Gilbert Tennant established the Log College to train ministers; Jonathan Edwards was the theologian of God’s love best known for his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; George Whitefield, an itinerant evangelist from Britain, pulled it all together with a series of trips to America,… Read more »
By now, regular readers of this blog know that I like to fill Saturdays with what I’m gleaning from my study of C. S. Lewis. I just completed writing the fourth chapter in my proposed book on Lewis’s impact on Americans. That chapter looks at the relationship between Lewis and Walter Hooper, an American who visited him in 1963 and became his private secretary for a few months before having to return to America. Hooper’s remembrances of his time with… Read more »
Walter Hooper, an American who went to visit C. S. Lewis in 1963 unexpectedly grew so close to him that during the summer months he ended up serving as his private secretary. Lewis invited him to return to England in 1964 to take up the position permanently. Lewis’s death in November 1963 seemed to end Hooper’s dream of renewing that role, but he shortly after became the primary literary agent for all of Lewis’s works, a role he has maintained… Read more »
David Garrick, the most popular actor in Britain in the eighteenth century, once remarked, “I would give a hundred guineas if I could say ‘Oh’ like Mr. Whitefield.” He was referring to evangelist George Whitefield, who, at the young age of 25, arrived in the American colonies and became the focal point of the First Great Awakening. Whitefield was educated at Oxford and became a close friend of John Wesley’s. Together they were part of a student organization called “The… Read more »
The mainstream media is making a big deal out of forcing Republicans to say President Obama is a Christian. As if they care. Surveys over the years have been consistent: the mainstream journalists that attempt to direct the thinking of the nation are overwhelmingly secularist; 90% or so seldom attend church, and when they do, one might question the choice of that church. What gospel is it preaching? No, they’re not really interested in Obama actually being a Christian. They… Read more »
By the start of this next week, I will have completed three chapters in my proposed book on C. S. Lewis’s impact on Americans. My first chapter deals with the often-repeated charge that Lewis didn’t really like Americans. Some excerpts from this chapter follow. Here’s how it begins: On the very first page of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, author Alan Jacobs tells the story of a precocious “Jack” Lewis, probably no more than eight… Read more »