Regular readers of my blog know that I am in the process of developing a course at my church on C. S. Lewis’s “Ransom Trilogy.” Although I’ve taught the third in the series a number of times, I’ve never attempted to cover all three, but I’m looking forward to helping tell Lewis’s tale to those who are unaware of it and who don’t know the underlying themes that Lewis explores. The background that led to Lewis writing the trilogy began… Read more »
Study C. S. Lewis long enough and you will come to the realization that there are gems to be found in some of his works that most have overlooked. We tend to concentrate on the well-known writings, which is understandable, but we also need to look deeper into the lesser-known pieces. One such gem can be found in a collection of Lewis’s essays in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Originally written as an introduction to a proposed book, “De… Read more »
My upper-level history adjunct offering this semester at Southeastern University is a course I’ve taught only once before but am eager to do so again. It’s the final one I developed when I was full-time at the university: Religion and the Presidents. The aim is to examine and analyze each president’s religious beliefs (or sometimes the lack thereof) and personal character to see how those beliefs showed up in their personal lives and in their public policies when they became… Read more »
A phrase I’ve heard throughout my life, “putting the cart before the horse,” comes to mind for me when I survey the Christian response to politics in our day. Or at least the response that many Christians are making with respect to the current political scene. The phrase means “reversing the proper order of things,” and I see that more and more. Christians should always put the Gospel and the Kingdom of God before anything else, and we can sometimes… Read more »
I’m a voracious reader and always have been. As a boy, I would come back from the local library with a stack of books in my bike’s basket—and would repeat the exercise regularly. My early adult life was filled with every new Christian book that hit the market. When I later decided to earn a doctorate in history, I devoured every book on American history that came across my path (along with the required texts for courses). And as a… Read more »
As part of my teaching responsibilities for my church, I have an adult Sunday class that I offer ten months out of the year. The goal of this class is to dig deeply into Scripture. In September, I began a series on 1 Corinthians 13, the famous Love Chapter. It has taken three months to navigate it in as detailed a fashion as I can, and the final session is this Sunday. I began the series with C. S. Lewis’s… Read more »
Three years ago, at a C. S. Lewis conference at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, I met a Romanian professor, Dr. Denise Vasiliu, who talked with me about the Lewis society she had helped inaugurate at a Romanian university. She had the distinction of being the first Romanian student whose doctoral dissertation was on Lewis, and she hoped that I would be able to speak at one of their conferences. I was immediately caught up in her vision for… Read more »