Devin Brown

Strange Help from Father Christmas

  • Nov 29, 2015
  • Devin Brown
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At the start of Prince Caspian as the four Pevensie children hunt through the dust-covered treasure chamber deep in the ruins of what was once Cair Paravel, Susan finds her bow and arrows magically preserved, but the enchanted horn that will always bring help is nowhere to be seen. Susan …

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Joy to the World: Lewis on Christmas Mirth

  • Dec 13, 2014
  • Devin Brown
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“I send no cards and give no presents except to children.” So C. S. Lewis wrote to his American correspondent on November 27, 1953. In an essay titled “What Christmas Means to Me” published in December several years later, Lewis again made it clear he deplored the endless shopping and …

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On Christ’s Passion and our Shared Darkness

  • Apr 19, 2014
  • Devin Brown
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Letters to Malcolm was the last book C. S. Lewis finished. Published posthumously in January 1964, three months after his death, it is one of Lewis’s best books though perhaps not one of his best known.  Tucked away in letter number eight is one of the most poignant short meditations …

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Lewis and His Dates

  • Mar 18, 2013
  • Devin Brown
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C. S. Lewis opens chapter four of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, with this statement:  “In January, 1911, just turned thirteen, I set out with my brother to Wyvern, he for the College and I for a preparatory school …” (56). However, since we know Lewis was born on November …

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Happy 75th Birthday to The Hobbit!

  • Sep 20, 2012
  • Devin Brown
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In a letter to the poet W. H. Auden, J. R. R., Tolkien describes the events that took place on a quiet summer’s day in 1930 as he was working at home in his study on a quiet, tree-lined street in residential Oxford: “All I remember about the start of …

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Lewis's First and Final Short Story

  • Jun 07, 2012
  • Devin Brown
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A joint conference of The Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C. S. Lewis and Friends and the C. S. Lewis and the Inklings Society was held recently at Taylor University. At one of the plenary sessions a new Lewis-related work was featured and given its official launch. “Light”: C. S. …

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A Look at Richard Platt’s New Work, "As One Devil to Another"

  • Mar 05, 2012
  • Devin Brown
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“My dear Wormwood,” begins one of C. S. Lewis’s most unusual and most successful works: The Screwtape Letters.  On May 2, 1941, British readers opened The Guardian, a weekly Anglican religious newspaper, to find the first in a series of thirty-one strange letters that would arrive in weekly installments, claiming to have …

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A Look at David C. Downing’s New Novel "Looking for the King"

  • Jan 27, 2011
  • David C. Downing
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Anglophiles, mystery lovers (particularly those who prefer the brainy rather than the bloody type), and Inkling fans everywhere are sure to find something to truly enjoy in Looking for the King, the recent novel written by Lewis scholar David Downing. Here’s how the description on the jacket flap begins: “It …

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Thoughts on the Third Narnia Film

  • Dec 09, 2010
  • Devin Brown
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“It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved.” …

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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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