Author's Note: This essay is dedicated to the memory of Barbara J. Elliott, my friend and colleague at Houston Christian University. Her academic and spiritual mentorship of my daughter Anastasia led, in part, to her decision to, like Barbara and Peter Kreeft before her, cross the Tiber to Rome. The Mirror, the Mask & the [...]
C.S. Lewis believes in the laws of nature, but he argues that miracles do not violate them because miracles are done by the Creator of the natural world Himself. Miracles are, therefore, exceptions to the laws of nature. The Great Commission commands all Christians to share the Gospel with non-Christians. Different groups of non-Christians want [...]
"That Hideous Strength" is, without doubt, one of the finest and wisest novels of the twentieth century, deserving its place in the canon of Great Books and contributing to the Great Conversation and the goodness, truth, and beauty of Christian Civilization. Over the past few weeks, in my two most recent essays for this illustrious [...]
On the most profound level, "Perelandra" deals with the mystery of freedom itself. How can a person with free will choose the good in the presence of seductive evil? My recent essay, “C.S. Lewis Goes to Mars”, discussed the deep philosophical underpinnings of Lewis’ novel, Out of the Silent Planet, which was the first of [...]
"Out of the Silent Planet" invites us to see the way that each of the three main characters grasps, or fails to grasp, the radical new perspectives offered by the encounter with alien species in a physically strange place and a metaphysically stranger “space”; ultimately, it invites us to judge the philosophies which inform or [...]
As an indomitable culture warrior and soldier of Christ, James Como died with his boots on, working in the Lewisian vineyard in which he had laboured for almost six decades. “Having labored in the Lewisian vineyard for nearly six decades I rejoice in the vitality of the laborers now reaping the grapes of joy.” These [...]
C.S. Lewis possessed an immense personality, the kind of personality that affected not only those around him, but also all those who came after him. Full of charisma and brilliance, he both attracted loyal friends and made bitter enemies wherever he went. Strangely enough, I didn’t come to C.S. Lewis as a person or as [...]
As a literary scholar, C.S. Lewis’s principal concern in his "Reflections on the Psalms" is to vindicate the Psalms as poetry and, therefore, vehicles of beauty, delight, and even (as he boldly puts it) “mirth.” These are things which, Lewis says, modern humanity needs badly. One of the great constants in my life has been [...]
When a lover of poetry as sensitive and intelligent as C.S. Lewis provides us a translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” we should pay attention. C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, edited by A.T. Reyes (184 pages, Yale University Press, 2011) Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one [...]
The Great War destroyed much the Inklings had held true, personally and culturally. Each lost friends, and each felt the guilt that any survivor of a war feels. Many of them refused to talk about their own experiences, for good or ill. J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps, provides the best example. Though not the best-known Inkling, Adam [...]
C.S. Lewis’s range of work—at a very high level, done with pellucid clarity and frequent epigrammatic wit—places him at, or near, the top of literary figures writing in English since the seventeenth century. In a recent issue of The Spectator (August 2025), Alexander Laman treated us to “Still Roaring,” a left-handed recognition of the staying [...]
To the 21st-century reader, the suggestion that cinema is a destructive and corrosive force will likely appear absurd. To attentive cultural critics of the early 20th century, however, it was all but self-evident. You’ve heard it before, certainly: The screens are killing us. They play to our basest passions and appetites, rendering us passive, and [...]
We need to return to first principles and to the most important questions one could ever ask: What is man? What is God? And, what is man’s relationship to God and to one another? The Christian Humanist does not pretend to know the answer to each of these questions, but he knows the questions must [...]
Fr. Michael Ward believes that each of the seven chronicles of Narnia can be seen to echo the seven planets of medieval cosmology in their themes, characters, and mood. In The Narnia Code, Father Michael Ward has abridged and made more accessible Planet Narnia, his doctoral thesis on C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia [...]