Category: The Historical Muse

Thoughts on history and the historical profession. Clio is the muse of history–this category title is a play on that concept.

C.S. Lewis on Loving One’s Country

  

Before C. S. Lewis starts analyzing the loves that his book, The Four Loves, focuses on, he sets the stage with some preliminary perspectives. In the last couple of posts, I’ve noted his identification of the distinctions between a gift-love, a need-love, and appreciative love. He then tackled the problem with making a religion out of the love of nature. In this new post, I will comment on the question he raises in the latter half of chapter 2. Perhaps… Read more »

An Anniversary

  

This week marks the one-year anniversary for going to the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College to share about our book, Many Times & Many Places: C. S Lewis & the Value of History. We are grateful for the invitation we received from David and Crystal Downing, who were then the co-directors of the Center. Not only did we have the privilege of sharing with an audience in the Bakke Auditorium, but we also went to the Downings’ home… Read more »

History in C. S. Lewis’s Personal Library

  

While researching my latest C. S. Lewis book, Many Times & Many Places: C. S. Lewis & the Value of History, I had the opportunity to take advantage of the Wade Center’s collection of books that Lewis himself owned and read. So, in the process of working on the book that was published in 2023, I also realized that the research I was doing for it would make for a good journal article. I’m more than pleased that the Wade… Read more »

Lewis’s “Learning in War-time”

  

Rev. T. R. Milford, rector of Oxford’s University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, wanted an authority to speak on the importance of continued education in a national crisis. That crisis was the Second World War, which Britain entered in September 1939 after the Nazi invasion of Poland. Why was this topic on the rector’s mind? Some would undoubtedly question—and perhaps some already were questioning—why a university such as Oxford should continue to prioritize academics at a time when all… Read more »

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 »

The Author Who Invented Her

  

I’ve written previously about C. S. Lewis’s appreciation of Dorothy L. Sayers’s works. He was particularly enthused by her new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. When he first learned she was undertaking that task, he remarked in a letter to her, “I expect I shall find you loud pedaling the comic element more than I approve, but it is much better to have your Dante as your Dante than to have a compromise between it and some one else’s. That’s… 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 »