It has long been my passion (and, I believe, also my calling) to serve as a catalyst for a new Christian cultural revival in the English-speaking world. In this sense, it could be said that I am striving to be what might be called a “catalytic converter” of the culture. Thanks be to God, there [...]
Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis: An Intimate Portrait of C.S. Lewis, edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982) A few weeks ago, I had the misfortune of discovering what an unattractive person Joy Davidman, C.S. “Jack” Lewis’s wife, was in real life. She [...]
It is sometimes said that religion and politics are the two topics that should not be discussed in polite company. The result is that nothing of importance is ever discussed, reducing the conversation of “polite company” to the level of the banal, at best, or to the level of gossip, at worst. And yet the [...]
“It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.” G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, August 17, 1918 The problem with the world in which we find ourselves is that it exists on the level of platitude. People no longer think, they merely regurgitate what they’ve been taught. Thus, for instance, all thoroughly [...]
Joy Davidman is such an unsympathetic figure that one must question the judgment and goodness of C.S. Lewis in choosing to marry her. Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman, ed. by Don W. King (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009) I’ve spent the better part of my career as a historian and a [...]
Because Whit Stillman has adapted Jane Austen’s Lady Susan for his new movie, Love & Friendship, it is worth asking the question: Will most people find that Mr. Stillman has discovered, in this early work of Austen, something new and unfamiliar about her, and made it accessible? The question is prompted by the reports of [...]
C.S. Lewis’ best novel, That Hideous Strength (1945), is a story first and foremost about marriage. As Lewis properly understood it, marriage is our first and most important institution in resisting evil as well as the ever-looming and hovering chaos of our modern and post-modern whirligig we call "Western society." "Matrimony was ordained, thirdly," said [...]
G.K. Chesterton was once asked what he would most like to have with him if he found himself marooned on a desert island. He replied, somewhat whimsically, that he’d like to have a book on practical shipbuilding. In this, if not in too much else, I’d like to beg to differ with the great man. [...]
The reason that Shakespeare is not of an age but for all time is that he serves the Holy Spirit and not the spirit of the age. Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage! My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie [...]
Considering that the use of words is dangerous and their abuse perilous, it should come as no surprise that “paganism” is a particularly dangerous word. The danger lies in the dangerous lies that arise when the word is employed thoughtlessly. It is, for instance, employed thoughtlessly by Christians when they describe any hedonist or heathen [...]
It is interesting to ponder how the reputations of John F. Kennedy and C. S. Lewis have fared. How have they weathered the inexorable passage of time? And where are they now: in Heaven or Hell? At 5:30pm (UK Time) on November 22, 1963, C.S. Lewis collapsed in his home in Oxford after a long [...]
Poor old Pippin and Merry have been captured by the orcs. Separated from their friends, wounded and strapped to the vile creatures for the long run to Isengard, Pippin suddenly feels sorry for himself. He thinks that he should never have left the Shire. He has set off the sounds in Moria that alerted the [...]
One of the mysteries of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the character of Tom Bombadil. Who is this odd, hill-leaping, silly-song-singing, farmer in the dell? Is this cavorting, yellow-booted bumpkin a darling that Tolkien could not kill, a rustic mechanical who simply had to have a part in the great saga? Was Bombadil [...]
“I should like to record my own love and my children’s love of E.A. Wyke-Smith’s Marvellous Land of Snergs,” reads an endorsement on the cover of that book. The endorser is J.R.R. Tolkien, and it was very kind of him to offer the guidance. Without him, it is likely we would only have visited a [...]