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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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 …
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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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In 1941 a former student of C. S. Lewis, then in her thirties, asked Lewis if he would become her confessor and spiritual director. Lewis politely declined, feeling that he didn’t have the proper credentials for the job (Letters, 2, 481). Yet he continued to write her letters of candid …
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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My Dear Wormwood, Since you are still on your 20-year probation, you cannot possibly expect to join me when I perform “The Top Ten Ways To Tempt” on the David Letterman show. Your inept bumbling cost us dearly. We do admire your request for a second chance, however. And since …
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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 …
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