Tag: Lewis

None Will Rise Again until It Has Been Buried

  

Love is such a misunderstood word. Every good thing that emanates from God can and has been perverted. Some expressions that we call love are just the opposite. C. S. Lewis gives us an excellent, and disturbing, example of this in The Great Divorce. In the fanciful tale of a bus trip from hell to the outskirts of heaven, Lewis lays bare all the roadblocks people set up that keep them from acknowledging God and His truth. One episode involves… Read more »

C. S. Lewis’s Change of Residence

  

Fifty-six years ago yesterday, C. S. Lewis changed his place of residence. He left this vale of tears for the eternal home he had always longed for and which he wrote about so eloquently, particularly in The Great Divorce and in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory.” He had fallen into a coma in July of 1963 and everyone thought those were to be his final moments. He surprised them by waking up and asking for some tea. He hadn’t… Read more »

A Time of Refreshing

  

Last week, I attended a C. S. Lewis conference in Montreat, North Carolina. It was a welcome respite from my regular routine of teaching and grading. To be clear, I love teaching (not so much the grading), but there are times of refreshing when one can simply sit and listen and take in what the Lord wants one to hear. This was one of those times. Some of the most accomplished Lewis scholars were there as presenters. In the photo… Read more »

This World’s Last Night

  

“The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne’s question ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ is equally relevant.” We live so much in the “present” that we often neglect what we say we believe about the transitory nature of this world. We have an eternity that awaits us, yet… Read more »

“We Make Men without Chests”

  

One book I always include in my C. S. Lewis course is his Abolition of Man. It’s a weighty book, and I sometimes wonder if my students will be able to grasp its message. Yet I also believe it is worth requiring it because the message is so relevant, even more so today than when the book was published during WWII. The overall theme is the replacement of the natural law God has implanted within his creation with whatever new… Read more »

Screwtape’s Agony Is Our Reward

  

My students finished reading C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters this week. The final letter includes one of the most profound insights Lewis has ever offered as to what happens when a Christian dies. Even though it is described through the eyes of a demon (or perhaps because it is described in that way), one can get a glimpse of the glory that awaits those who have found the narrow path and remained faithful. Wormwood’s “patient” has died in a… Read more »

God’s Law, Man’s Freedom, & Good Government: A Lewis Perspective

  

As a historian, and as someone who has also taught in a master’s program of government, I am naturally attuned to the politics of our day. That doesn’t mean I love politics or am particularly enamored of the way politics manifests itself through the aggrandizement of politicians’ egos. Yet I cannot divorce myself from it because it now seems to invade every aspect of our lives. What I do like is governing, in the sense that God is interested in… Read more »