Tag: Lewis

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 »

Meditating on the “Meditation”

  

C. S. Lewis was not a person who enjoyed political arguments. That distaste went back to his home life in Belfast as his father and guests to the home would enter into such arguments. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t think about good governance and the Christian’s role in that governance. His most direct and detailed commentary on how Christians should approach politics is found in an essay he wrote for the Anglican newspaper, The Guardian, in 1941: “Meditation on… Read more »

The Lure of the Inner Ring

  

How does one rank C. S. Lewis’s essays? Which ones are the best and why? Just as with his books, answers will differ depending on one’s personal history, the baggage one must deal with, and the bent of one’s intellectual curiosity. Those all come together for me in appreciation for “The Inner Ring,” which was a lecture Lewis gave to King’s College, in the University of London, in 1944. What is an Inner Ring? It’s a group that one perceives… Read more »