Many twenty- and thirty-somethings came of age a decade ago, back when Frodo set off on his epic, three-movie quest to Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings. The mere strains of the opening soundtrack are enough to evoke all the memories of that time: how we felt as …
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Perelandra is the first book I read by C. S. Lewis, and the encounter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. I was a freshman in college, and I was wrestling mightily with all the usual questions so many Christians ponder: how could a good God create a world …
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Here’s a question for you from The Great Divorce. Later in the story, George MacDonald meets up with the narrator and becomes the guide into Heave. He says that, “all that are in hell, choose it.” Do you agree with that? Further, he defines two different people, “those who say to …
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An Introduction is a signpost – pointing not to itself but to the pages that follow. While “On the Reading of Old Books” is usually reprinted (and presented) as a stand-alone essay by Lewis, it is actually the introduction to a book written by someone else: “The Incarnation of the …
Read MoreC. S. Lewis was deeply interested in heaven. In his nonfiction prose he frequently discussed the nature of heaven (and, less frequently, the nature of hell) and explained how to take part in it. In his works of fiction he created several striking descriptions of what heaven (and, in less …
Read Moreby Jerram Barrs I want to begin by explaining why I chose this title. First, we go back all the way to Lewis’ childhood. From a very early age Lewis had loved fairy stories, legends and myths. He delighted particularly in the myths of the Norsemen – the sagas of …
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Near the end of chapter seven of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the narrator steps in to tell us about the change that has occurred in the formerly obnoxious Eustace. It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time forth Eustace was a different …
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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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C.S. Lewis by profession was an Oxford don for 30 years and then another six at Cambridge. He was born in Ireland and from those boarding school days until the end of his life he lived in England. He is a man who is sometimes accused of having led a …
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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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