Tag: history

Being Christian in a Non-Christian Culture

  

I’m currently teaching a course at my church that I’ve titled “Being Christian in a Non-Christian Culture.” I laid out five questions at the beginning of the course to show what I hope to accomplish through this teaching. They are the following: What is the Church and what is its mission? How are Christians supposed to interact with the culture? What is the proper relationship between the Church and the State? What has happened to the Christian witness to the… Read more »

A Two-Year Publishing Anniversary

  

Two years ago this month, this book took its place alongside the multitude of books about C.S. Lewis. Each author hopes to find a niche for his topic; my co-author, Jamin Metcalf, and I believed we had settled on an aspect of Lewis’s life and writings that few others had emphasized: the fact that Lewis not only was a masterful apologist for the Christian faith, a wonderfully imaginative writer of fiction, and a superb analyst in his primary field of… Read more »

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 »

Lewis-Sayers-History: The Research Continues

  

I mentioned in a previous post my research into the educational philosophies of C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers and the quest to determine how closely they may have aligned. There are many facets of education to consider when doing such research. One quite evident agreement between these two friends/colleagues is the significance of studying history. This is naturally interesting to me, as I have been a historian and professor of history for more than thirty years. If you… Read more »