Going through the letters of C. S. Lewis, I reached, this week, the time in 1960 when his wife, Joy, died. After a two-year cancer hiatus, the disease came back in full force throughout her bones. Lewis always knew this could happen. In 1957, after the laying on of hands and prayer, she made a miraculous recovery (even the doctors admitted as much). Yet both she and Lewis knew this might not be a permanent thing, that perhaps God was… Read more »
On this date, in 1973, the United States Supreme Court effectively ruled that abortion is a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Since then, approximately 57 million innocent lives have been taken. Many Americans have learned to “live with” these results, apparently numbed morally by the outright horror of an act that has cost more lives than anything done by Hitler or Stalin. We have been trained to think the human child is not a child. We have been schooled by… Read more »
C. S. Lewis’s letters to his American correspondents cover the gamut of topics. Sometimes, he goes into deeply Biblical issues, offering advice from his well of knowledge. Other times, he is more whimsical, but also with an air of wisdom that is hard to miss. To one of his regular correspondents going through some physical trials, he ruminates on the process of getting older. Maybe I’m drawn to this because of my own advancing years, but, for whatever reason, I… Read more »
Perhaps the only thing some people know about Puritan history in America is that they executed presumed witches. Americans typically know nothing about how Puritans gave us our first constitution and bill of rights, but they are always told about the Salem witchcraft trials. How does one analyze this episode of Puritan history fairly? Of course, most historians automatically denigrate the Puritans for it because they operate on a naturalistic worldview that says belief in witches is a superstition of… Read more »
The big news this weekend was the major march in Paris to show solidarity against terrorism. More than one million people showed up. Included in that assemblage were forty heads of state, even those who have issues with one another, such as Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. One nation’s leader was noticeably absent. More on that in a minute. While I don’t want to downplay the significance of that many people showing up—and so many… Read more »
My intensive reading of C. S. Lewis letters is part of another of my sabbatical projects, with a book as the end goal. This has been no drudgery; rather, it has been fascinating to delve into them and see how Lewis responds to his American correspondents. Often, he writes to children who have read his Narnia books. One of his regular child correspondents was Joan Lancaster, who, for her age, was quite mature and thoughtful. Lewis seemed to take an… Read more »
Periodically, I’ve been providing updates on my sabbatical year. Those of you who have kept up with this know I’m working on more than one project. One, though, has kept me moving across the country to different presidential libraries as I examine documents related to spiritual advisers to presidents. I’ve already gone to Wheaton College–back in August–and researched in the archives of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, since he is the premier spiritual adviser for a number of presidents since… Read more »