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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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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The first time I visited Oxford, in 1982, the porter at Magdalen College didn’t even recognize the name— C. S. Lewis. I had asked him if he could give me directions to Lewis’s former home in Headington Quarry. Obviously he could not and did not. Things have changed a lot …
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Robert Velarde is author of Conversations with C.S. Lewis (IVP, 2008), a creative book that uses an imaginary conversation with C.S. Lewis as its main premise. In so doing, Velarde enlivens episodes of Lewis’s life by using much of what Lewis wrote about to fuel the conversation between Lewis and …
Read MoreC. S. Lewis’s earliest biographers, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, wrote that if they were going to a desert island and could take only one Lewis book, it would probably be Mere Christianity. That’s a fascinating choice, considering that both men were thoroughly acquainted with Lewis’s whole body of …
Read MoreThere are few characters in literature who embody positive goodness more powerfully than Aslan. In his presence, the children feel at once a sense of joy and fear, an ecstasy mingled with terror, an intimation of both the actively sublime and the passively beautiful. Aslan is neither a pretty object …
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“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” That concise statement by the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 5:19a) has kept theologians busy for nearly two thousand years, trying to understand what exactly is being affirmed in the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement. C. S. Lewis never …
Read MoreDear Grace, I wish your godfather and I could be there for your confirmation next Sunday, but it looks like this letter will have to do instead (not that I could be any more eloquent in person). I feel rather like C. S. Lewis when he was writing to his …
Read MorePart C. S. Lewis-biography, part literary analysis, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia is, at its heart, the story of a journey. The first step came when its author, Laura Miller, was given a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by her second grade teacher. …
Read MoreAsk any ten avid readers of C. S. Lewis to describe his vocation and I suspect 9 out of 10 will use one of the following terms: Christian apologist, fantasy/sf writer, children’s author, literary critic, Oxford don—a handful, maybe even “poet.” Few, I reckon, would think to refer to Jack, …
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