Tag: Walsh

Perelandra: Genesis & Impact

  

I’ve been hard at work developing my course on C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, and just completed my preparation for teaching the second book, Perelandra. This mythical novel, which at least one critic said should have been written as a poem rather than in prose, tells the story of an unfallen world (which we call Venus), a temptation for its first inhabitants to follow in Earth’s fateful path of rebellion against the Creator, and the attempt by a chosen earthling… Read more »

C. S. Lewis Loses His Joy

  

On this day, July 13, 1960, C. S. Lewis lost his wife, Joy, to cancer. It was a devastating loss for him; their very short marriage he considered the apex of his life. Here’s how I wrote about it in my book, America Discovers C. S. Lewis: His Profound Impact: “The blow has fallen,” Lewis informed [his friend Chad] Walsh in October 1959. News that Joy’s cancer had returned was a shock. Prior to receiving this bad news, they had… Read more »

America Discovers C. S. Lewis: A Review

  

The new edition of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal has some marvelous articles, and tucked into the back of the journal in the book review section is a review of my recent offering, America Discovers C. S. Lewis: His Profound Impact. The review was undertaken by Lewis scholar Charlie Starr. It’s always nice when a reviewer catches the spirit of the book he is analyzing; Starr accomplishes that admirably when reporting on what I’ve written. “We might ask,” Starr… Read more »

Chad Walsh Meets C. S. Lewis

  

In last Saturday’s C. S. Lewis post, I related how Chad Walsh, an English professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, turned from atheism to Christianity and how Lewis’s writings, particularly Perelandra, played a prominent role in his conversion. This led Walsh to want to know more about his new favorite author. He wrote an article about him in The Atlantic Monthly but sought to make the thesis of that article into a book, explaining in greater detail how Lewis’s writings… Read more »

Chad Walsh’s Baptized Imagination

  

One of C. S. Lewis’s earliest American friendships was with Chad Walsh, a professor of English at Beloit College in Wisconsin. Like Lewis, Walsh traveled the road from atheism to Christianity, and Lewis helped him on that journey. “In my case there was no childhood faith,” Walsh wrote in an account of how he eventually found the Christian path. If I ever believed in God as a small child, no memory of the time remains with me. I regarded myself… Read more »

A Baptized Imagination

  

The first book to analyze C. S. Lewis and his popularity was written by an American, Chad Walsh, an English professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin. It came out in 1949 with the title C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics. Walsh had Lewis to thank for his own conversion. “In my case there was no childhood faith,” Walsh wrote in an account of how he eventually found the Christian path. “If I ever believed in God as a small… Read more »