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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In the last chapter of A Grief Observed, Lewis admits that grief is, “like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” If you’ve grieved over someone’s death, you know the image Lewis is casting. Happiness almost feels a little haunted, but time evaporates …
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Death leaves us feeling flat and thinking the world mean. Lewis knew it, but Joy’s passing made it real and in full color. He questions in the third chapter of A Grief Observed what kind of faith he had, and, if, “my house has collapsed at one blow.” He calls …
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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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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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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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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 MoreWhen the third volume of C.S. Lewis’s Collected Letters came out in 2006, it did not receive nearly the attention it deserved. Its publication, however, marked the summit of assembling and editing which Walter Hooper almost single-handedly accomplished in the space of eight years. But where were the mainstream reviews …
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Till We Have Faces is heavily motivated by Lewis’s longtime interest in the cupid/psyche myth, but now influenced by and filtered through his courtship and marriage to Joy Davidman and mature Christian faith, and interwoven with several complementary writing projects of the roughly same period (Surprised by Joy; The Four …
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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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