The state of politics, in the United States, England and Europe, especially, can absorb so much of our attention, derision, imposition, edification, and so on. It’s exhausting no matter if you agree, disagree, offend or defend the people or the policies. In a 1948 letter to a friend Lewis suggests …
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The September 8, 1947 cover of Time Magazine improbably depicts the demure C. S. Lewis accompanied by a fiercely impish devil poised on his left shoulder, a caricature of his infamous fictional protagonist, Screwtape, AKA, Senior Tempter of Hell.
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Introduction: Last Fall 2011 on sabbatical, I had the privilege of being a scholar in residence at the Kilns, C. S. Lewis’s old home in an outlying residential area called Risinghurst, just about three miles from Oxford and Oxford University. I didn’t know it when I arrived, but about three days …
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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 …
Read MoreOur continued affection for and the extended appeal of C. S. Lewis more than 45 years after his death, so near the end of the first decade of the supposedly post-postmodern 21st Century, suggests to me two things about him and his work that may seem patently obvious. Except for …
Read More“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to …
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, …
Read MoreThe first time I visited England I was ten years old. My parents let me walk around London by myself armed with nothing more than a map, layered clothing appropriate to the sometimes damp and foggy weather, and good walking shoes. I still remember staring through the gates of Buckingham …
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