Reflections on God … Man … Life
I’ve written a couple posts this year about the course I have developed for my church’s Parish Academy this fall. The title for the course is “Writers C. S. Lewis Admired.” The four writers I’ve chosen to focus on in the course are George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy L. Sayers. A previous post centered on Chesterton, the one of the four I knew the least about. It wasn’t that I was completely ignorant of… Read more »
Last year’s major teaching project was the Ransom Trilogy. I’m now embarking on another one for the coming fall semester for my church’s Parish Academy program. I have no title for it yet, but the substance is set: an examination of key authors in C. S. Lewis’s life and circle. They are George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Lewis knew two of these writers by their works only; the other two he knew… Read more »
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 »
I’ve never read George MacDonald’s Thomas Wingfold, Curate, but in the anthology C. S. Lewis put together of MacDonald’s writings, one selection from that book stood out to me this morning. I think the nugget in this excerpt is worth noting. It begins with MacDonald quoting someone who says, “I cannot see what harm would come of letting us know a little—as much at least as might serve to assure us that there was more of something on the other… Read more »
C. S. Lewis, as a young man, and before he was a Christian, read the novel Phantastes, written by a minister named George MacDonald. He was so taken by the novel that eventually, after his conversion, he delved into MacDonald’s sermons also. He found treasures there, so many that he edited them into an anthology for which he wrote an endearing preface. I’ve recently begun working my way through this anthology—indeed, it’s now part of my morning devotions—and have found… Read more »