Tolkien, Lewis, Disney? The Greatest Pre-Evangelists of Our Age

by Gene Fant

If Billy Graham is the great evangelist of our age, we can number Lewis, Tolkien, and Disney among the greatest of our pre-evangelists.  Continue Reading »

2 Dec 2013

Justin Martyr: Not Just Dead, Just Not Augustine

by John Mark Reynolds

This great twentieth-century scholar loved Plato, wrote Christian apologetics, and was a first-rate scholar with secular publications still in print. Sadly, A. E. Taylor was not C. S. Lewis, lived about the same time, and is little read by anyone but specialists while Lewis continues to drive whole . . . . Continue Reading »

24 Sep 2010

Chemistry and Culpability

by Gayle Trotter

In response to the question, “What were they thinking?” Christopher Buckley argues that the same substance propelling the success of men such as John Edwards, Mark Sanford, and Tiger Woods also detonates their spectacular flame-outs.  “The very drive that propels these people . . . . Continue Reading »

16 Mar 2010

Tiger’s Bright Burning

by Gayle Trotter

What’s up with all of the recent headlines about married men behaving badly?  First, John Edwards became a baby daddy to Rielle Hunter.  Then Mark Sanford hiked the Appalachian Trail, via Argentina, and his wife detailed her travails in a book entitled Staying True.  But the (so . . . . Continue Reading »

6 Mar 2010

C.S. Lewis Makes a Good Daddy Out of Me.

by Hunter Baker

My son, Andrew (age 7) has been reading way too much Pokemon and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.  The result has been an infusion of ideas and habits that aren’t necessarily all that helpful from a behavioral perspective.Suddenly, I realized that maybe I, the scholar-father, should make sure he . . . . Continue Reading »

2 Dec 2009

Imagining Narnia

by Dermot Quinn

CS. Lewis is hard to like and easy to love. As a solitary, clever, and bookish child he was a study in precocity, a model prig. “I have a prejudice against the French,” he announced, a four year old, to his father. Why? “If I knew why it wouldn’t be a prejudice.” At the age of nine he was . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jan 2006

Auden and the Limits of Poetry

by Alan Jacobs

By the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England. His verse was brilliant, ironic, often funny, wide-ranging in its reference—equally at home in the worlds of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the technology of mining—and sometimes . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 2001

C. S. Lewis on Mere Science

by M. D. Aeschliman

In The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis noted that nothing he could say would keep some people from saying that he was anti-science, a charge he was nevertheless eager to refute. In fact he had received the kind of philosophical education at Oxford that enabled him, like John Henry Newman before him, . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Oct 1998

The Everyday C.S. Lewis

by Gilbert Meilaender

“One is sometimes (not often) glad not to be a great theologian. One might so easily confuse it with being a good Christian.” Thus C. S. Lewis wrote in Reflections on the Psalms. Similarly, Lewis’s religious writings are full of asides to the effect that he is not a theologian and that what he . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 1998

Mortality: The Measure of Our Days

by Gilbert Meilaender

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all.  —King Lear For much of human history death was associated at least as much with infancy and youth as with old age. To live to be old was an achievement—a modest victory over death, and one often . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 1991