Reversing the Faith of an Adult Lifetime

Over the years, I’ve taught my “Witness of Whittaker Chambers” course many times. It never gets old or stale; in fact, each time I sense that the Lord uses it to help me see even more of His mercy and grace. The life of Whittaker Chambers exemplifies God’s grace while simultaneously challenging readers of his masterful autobiography, Witness, to seek ever more earnestly the face of God. In teaching the course this semester, the depth of Chambers’s personal path and… Read more »

Observing a Grief

This past week in my “C. S. Lewis on Life, Death, and Eternity” class at church, I and the other 35 participants who joined me either in person or via Zoom, immersed ourselves in Lewis’s painfully personal account of how he reacted to the death of his wife, Joy. What began as some jottings—almost stream-of-consciousness writing—in a notebook eventually did find its way into print as A Grief Observed. Some find this little book disconcerting because it reveals the struggle… Read more »

When Subversion Is a Good Thing, Shocking as That May Seem

Dorothy L. Sayers was a “find” for me in just the last few years. Once I realized she and C. S. Lewis were friends and that he loved her BBC radio plays titled The Man Born to Be King, I knew I had to be better acquainted with her writings. I read all of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, luxuriated in The Mind of the Maker, devoted myself to the book version of the radio plays (with her marvelous introduction),… Read more »

Only Two Kinds of People in the End

I first read The Great Divorce when I was an undergraduate at Purdue University a long time ago. To be honest, that reading occurred less than a decade after C. S. Lewis’s death. I’ve reread it more times than I can recall and have offered it to students in my university course on Lewis. In that course, though, there are so many Lewis books to read that I cannot give it the time it deserves for discussion. But I’ve been… Read more »

The Hellacious Choice

I’ve been teaching a special class at my church on C. S. Lewis. We meet every Monday evening (both in person and on Zoom) to cover some of Lewis’s most thoughtful discourses on life, death, and eternity. My opening slide for the class revealed what we were going to read. We’ve concluded our discussion of Surprised by Joy and just this past Monday finished key chapters in The Problem of Pain. The most jarring and challenging was the chapter on… Read more »

The Lessons of Pain

I’m currently teaching a weekly class at my church that I have titled “C. S. Lewis on Life, Death, and Eternity.” We just finished his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and will, this next week, examine key chapters in The Problem of Pain, certainly a significant part of life as we all know it. Lewis began writing this book in 1939 and was able to read it chapter-by-chapter to the Inklings when they met. I’m sure the feedback he received was… Read more »

I’m Evangelical, but What Does That Mean Anymore?

Evangelical is a good word. It comes from “evangel,” which means “good news.” For Christians, an evangelical is someone who declares the Good News that God so loved the world that He gave His Son, Jesus, to lead us out of sin and back into relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So it’s a truly good word. Yet, like all good words, it can be maligned. To many outside the Christian faith, being an evangelical is now looked… Read more »