A Grief Observed

Observing Grief: 2

  • Jan 26, 2012
  • Zach Kincaid
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C. S. Lewis was profoundly changed, as one should be, by his marriage to Joy Davidman. A Grief Observed is his ordeal of dealing with her death in light of the Gospel and the goodness of God. We turn to chapter two at present since chapter one is discussed in …

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Observing Grief: 1

  • Jan 05, 2012
  • Zach Kincaid
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A Grief Observed is the subject for the next few entries. It’s a short book of four chapters and it’s a notebook of sorts as Lewis wrestles with his wife’s death.  The Problem of Pain was written years earlier (1940) but this account, as Douglas Gresham references in its introduction, …

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The Great Iconoclast

  • Oct 04, 2011
  • Zach Kincaid
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In writing through the pain of losing his wife, Lewis says that a picture is not good enough. He wants her. No resemblance or icon that approaches her likeness is enough. In the same way he says that he needs Christ and not something that resembles him and that his …

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Corkscrews, Cathedrals, and the Chronicles of Narnia

  • Sep 08, 2010
  • Devin Brown
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C. S. Lewis opens “A Preface to Paradise Lost” with an imperative for all would-be critics: “The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. …

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The Problem of Pain

  • Feb 26, 2010
  • Zach Kincaid
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C.S. Lewis puts his wages on a God who holds goodness and pain in a paradox. The Problem of Pain demonstrates a more distant, less emotional reaction to humanity’s situation, while A Grief Observed reads like a psalm of lament from within pain itself. The two texts compliment one another …

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The Reality of Pain

  • Feb 18, 2010
  • Zach Kincaid
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Lent opens this week and it’s a reminder of suffering and pilgrimage. C. S. Lewis wrote two books on pain, The Problem of Pain in 1940 and A Grief Observed in 1961. In The Problem of Pain Lewis says, like Chekhov, there is “so much mercy, yet still there is …

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Lewis On Death

  • Oct 16, 2008
  • Robin Baker
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American culture (and Western culture generally) has a difficult time dealing with death and the dying. We often do not know how to interact with those who are terminally ill. In a culture that is all about this life, consuming goods and living life to its fullest, death is the …

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How C. S. Lewis Expands Our View of God

  • Sep 21, 2008
  • Peter J. Schakel
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Peter Schakel’s new book, Is Your Lord Large Enough? How C. S. Lewis Expands Our View of God (InterVarsity Press, 2008), is about image. “We can know people only through mental images,” he says in the opening pages. Is this more true about a God who we haven’t seen than …

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