Tag: Sayers

The New Path

  

When my university gave me a sabbatical year for research and writing in 2014-2015, I had some of the best plans laid out that a man could devise. In tandem with a religion professor, we were going to write a book on spiritual advisors to presidents. Eagerly, I lined up trips to presidential libraries, starting with Reagan and Nixon in California, then in an order I don’t recall exactly, ultimately visiting libraries for Eisenhower, Johnson, Clinton, and the first George… Read more »

Honoring Sayers

  

“She was the first person of importance who ever wrote me a fan-letter,” C.S. Lewis noted about Dorothy L. Sayers. “I liked her, originally, because she liked me; later, for the extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation—as I like a high wind.” I love the way Lewis described his relationship with Sayers. As a man who enjoyed long walks in the countryside, Lewis would undoubtedly appreciate a bracing wind, and that’s the comparison he made with Dorothy Sayers. A… Read more »

A Time of Preparation

  

July and August are my months “off” from teaching, but they aren’t months off for preparation. Although I’m constantly preparing year-round, the absence of teaching during this time allows a greater concentration on what I’ll be doing over the next year. Much of it has to do with C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers. Last month, I received a pleasant surprise when I was contacted by the Wade Center about an article that I had sent in a couple… Read more »

Teaching Lewis & Sayers

  

I’m currently teaching my university course on C. S. Lewis. We have traversed the Lewis universe by reading Surprised by Joy, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and his superb sermon/essay, “Learning in War-time.” We are now deeply embroiled in the third installment of his Ransom Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Coming attractions: The Last Battle, A Grief Observed, and Lewis’s greatest—in my estimation—sermon/essay of all, “The Weight of Glory.” I wish I could have given them even more;… Read more »

The Author Who Invented Her

  

I’ve written previously about C. S. Lewis’s appreciation of Dorothy L. Sayers’s works. He was particularly enthused by her new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. When he first learned she was undertaking that task, he remarked in a letter to her, “I expect I shall find you loud pedaling the comic element more than I approve, but it is much better to have your Dante as your Dante than to have a compromise between it and some one else’s. That’s… Read more »

“The Mind of the Maker”: Lewis on Sayers–Part 3

  

This is will be my third and final look at connections I see between C. S. Lewis’s thoughts and what Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in her valuable work, The Mind of the Maker. Chapter eight is appropriately entitled “Pentecost,” as it focuses on the power of words to move men. Lewis was a dedicated wordsmith who knew that the right words used at the right time in just the right way, could spark the imagination and jumpstart the mind. Sayers… Read more »

“The Mind of the Maker”: Lewis on Sayers–Part 2

  

In a previous post, I showed how C. S. Lewis praised Dorothy L. Sayers’s book, The Mind of the Maker, and offered one example. I would like to add to that today with some similarities I see between what Lewis wrote in some of his works and what Sayers wrote in her book. Chapter three, “Idea, Energy, and Power,” develops Sayers’s thesis by showing how any completed work in life starts with an idea in the mind. This correlates nicely… Read more »