Reflections on God … Man … Life
The first half of 2024 is going to be a banner time for spreading the Good News through the lens of C. S. Lewis. So many opportunities have opened for me to do so that I want to share them one by one. At Southeastern University, I will be teaching my Lewis course once again. Students will be exposed to the scope of Lewis’s writings—apologetic, fiction, and the more personal ones. They will begin with his autobiography, Surprised by Joy,… Read more »
Out of all of C. S. Lewis’s superb essays, two stand out to me. As with many others, I am enthralled by his war-time sermon (turned into an essay) “The Weight of Glory.” It is Lewis at his highest peak of wordsmithing. The other one that has always captured my attention is “Learning in War-time,” which, like “The Weight of Glory,” was a war-time sermon that became an essay. The question raised in the sermon/essay is whether, during a time… Read more »
I don’t comment on my birthday every year, but I do want to take some time today to reflect on God’s blessings as I consider my 72nd birthday. First and foremost, I am grateful to the Lord for His unfailing love and compassion toward me. I have had highs and lows spiritually in my life, and at one time I almost succeeded in walking away from Him. Yet He never gave up on me. This particular Scripture rings true on… Read more »
Cliches can be true. Nearly everyone is familiar with “when one door closes, God will open another one” (yes, there are slight variations to it, but the point is made, I trust). I’ve found that to be the case in my life. Academic doors closed for me a number of times, but there was always a new door that opened almost immediately afterward. The latest closed door led to my church hiring me as a teacher with the specific task… Read more »
Recently, I was reminded of one of C. S. Lewis’s essays that I hadn’t thought about in quite a while; in fact, I couldn’t recall if I had read it. Yet, as a professor of history, I must have perused his “Is History Bunk?” at some time or other. So I checked into it as if it were a new piece of Lewis’s corpus that I hadn’t seen before. The essay is found in the collection called Present Concerns, the… Read more »
We’re at the point in my C. S. Lewis course where I am giving the students The Abolition of Man. It’s a harder read than most of what I give them from Lewis, but I’ve never seriously considered dropping it from the course. It’s just too important, and the concepts within it are so significant to their worldview that I believe I would be doing a disservice to avoid it. I do, though, make sure I give it enough time… Read more »
C. S. Lewis wrote the essay “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought” in 1946. Now, some people, noting the date of that essay, will dismiss it immediately. After all, they might ask, “How can an essay from 1946 that talks about modern man have anything worthwhile to say to us in 2020?” That question, of course, rests on one’s definition of modern. As a historian, I have no problem seeing 1946 as modern because I compare that date with… Read more »