Is it possible that the popular Indiana Jones trilogy is a cleverly-structured, well-thought-out, theologically-astute analogy of the Christian spiritual quest? I do not suggest that it is an allegory, and I realize it is always possible to read too much into popular film and fiction, but might there be more meaning there than meets the [...]
We are still spirited in the West, but the modern spirit is based on egoistic ambition and self-referencing subjectivism. A spirit of relativism today leads us into the desert of self-determination, where we are encouraged to build our own castles on shifting sands. Our grip on revealed truth about the ontological realities of God the [...]
The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and [...]
Hoping to prove successful in combining a love of things old with mythology and with a desire to uphold the dignity of the human person in a world rent asunder by warring ideologies, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis challenged each other to create deep works of the imagination. After a “toss up,” the two men [...]
Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence Behold the Forms of nature. They discern Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities Which mortals lack or indirectly learn. Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying, Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear, High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal Huge Principles appear. The Tree-ness of the tree they [...]
On the day C.S. Lewis died—November 22, 1963—the world was hardly in a position to take notice. The assassination of an American President, after all, had clearly and shockingly co-opted everything that day, including even the ending of a life unsurpassed for its sheer breath catching lucidity in defense of ordinary Christian belief. But history, [...]
Since the appearance of John Garth’s excellent Tolkien and the Great War in 2003, a number of scholars and writers have explored the role and influence of war on the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and other members of the Inklings. In reviewing Mr. Garth’s book when it came out, I noted that the [...]
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) “Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect and with his usual affectation, it is nonetheless true [...]
I became infected with this most deadly disease when I was ten years old. The 1966 World Book Encyclopedia Yearbook arrived, and working my way through it I came across the obituary of T.S. Eliot. There he was in his “five piece suit” gazing at the camera in that lugubriously quizzical way he had. I [...]
On my many travels giving talks on topics related to Christian literature, I am often asked why the Christian Literary Revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has come to an end. Why are there no writers of the caliber of Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot, Greene, Waugh, Tolkien or Lewis today? Or, to cross [...]
While anyone who knows anything about C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, or Owen Barfield knows of the existence of the Inklings, the group remains nearly impossible to define. Even the members of the group could not identify exactly what it was or what it meant. By the mid 1940s, Lewis defined it as a [...]
The relationship between C.S. Lewis and poet Roy “Zulu” Campbell was a troubled and mercurial one, which lurched, sometimes violently, between enmity and friendship. In this third and final essay about the relationship between C. S. Lewis and Roy Campbell, the “bearded poet” whom Lewis lampoons in The Pilgrim’s Regress, we will chart their troubled [...]
In my last essay, “Walking with C. S. Lewis,” I praised the new annotated edition of Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress, while regretting that the generally excellent notes had failed to identify the mysterious “bearded poet” whom John, the pseudo-Lewis protagonist, meets in Zeitgeistheim, a place where Modernism melds fashion with fascism. This curious and exotic bearded [...]
According to St. Augustine, Alexander the Great had a rather interesting conversation with a captured pirate. “How dare you molest the sea?” Alexander demanded. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate angrily replied. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief. You, doing it with a great [...]