What is friendship? Why is it important and why is it worth cultivating? These axiomatic questions form a significant part of the thought and writing of C. S. Lewis. In a letter to his lifelong friend, Arthur Greeves, Lewis touched upon the heart and meaning of friendship: The First [Universal Friend] is the alter ego, [...]
In a culture in which algorithms control the content we consume—what movies to watch, what goods to buy, what news to listen to—the choice to read a book whose philosophy opposes our own and questions our sacred assumptions is nothing short of revolutionary. “I choose novels that let me turn my brain off,” a student [...]
Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and [...]
C.S. Lewis, like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, possessed the gift of bringing great truths to light through the telling of stories, much as Christ does in His parables and indeed in the story of His life. The following is an interview with Joseph Pearce. Your new book is entitled Further Up and Further In: Understanding [...]
Real, actual letters are a gift, an insight into our best and our worst selves. Unlike the present world of the ephemeral email and hatchet posts on social media, letters of the pre-internet era could be gorgeous works of art. In them, the writer shares just a bit of his soul, preserving it for time, [...]
When C.S. Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931, he admitted that he did so in large part because Christianity answered the pagan longings he had experienced in his love of mythology and of all things northern. Northern Irishman C.S. Lewis holds such an important place in the hearts, minds, and souls of American Protestants that [...]
The apocalyptic vision in science fiction is akin to the memento mori in mediaeval art. It reminds us of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. And these last things remind us of the first things—most importantly the primary reality that we are made in the image of God to love and serve [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien's story of Númenor is the story of Athens, Rome, Great Britain, the United States, and every power that began with the best of intentions and saw itself decline because of envy and pride. It is the story of the Fall in Eden. It is grim, timeless, and true. Unquestionably, Tolkien's mythology was massive [...]
Seventy-five years after the publication of C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man, it is safe to say that the scientists and technologists and state makers and educational institutions and corporations have continued on the deadly path of making man not in the image of God, as manifested in nature, but in the image of some [...]
C.S. Lewis believed that immutable and timeless universal principles governed all persons throughout time and space. Though these principles would find manifestations particular to era, culture, and individual, the rules remained eternal. Additionally, these natural laws would always and everywhere be “self-evident.” Men might choose to ignore, distort, or mock them, but they could not [...]
In the modern world, C.S. Lewis argues in "The Abolition of Man," we have trained the head and encouraged the heart, while neglecting the soul, the most important part of the person. As Lewis so scathingly puts it, we are producing men without chests. No one could rightly accuse C.S. Lewis, who was raised as [...]
Though C.S. Lewis had certainly been a patriot in the First World War, he was determined to be a prophet in the Second. In his speeches and his writings, he spoke directly to a people roused by the heat of battle and war, when morality and norms traditionally fail, even in the best societies. In [...]
“Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis” allows us to enter into the friendship of the two men in some mysterious and possibly mystical way. It is not just a testament to that friendship, it is a testament to friendship in general. “He stood before me as a mystery as solidly as he stood beside me as [...]
Leo Tolstoy shows us the character of Napoleon and shows us the hope of near-repentance, and the devastatingly fearful return to a world of artificial phantoms. I recently wrote an essay about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Here, I discuss another Russian novel, published at the exact same time, in the exact same periodical: Leo [...]