Telling a More Beautiful Story: Lessons for the Church from Lewis for Today

While many scholars have noted Lewis’s affinity for medieval cosmology and the planets, it was only the meticulous scholarship and intellectual curiosity of our next speaker that led to one of the blockbuster moments of Lewis scholarship, when our speaker’s book Planet Narnia showed definitively the relationship between the medieval Seven Heavens and the seven Chronicles of Narnia. More recently, his magisterial work After Humanity has brought Lewis’s essential work The Abolition of Man to the attention of a whole new generation of readers. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams praised After Humanity, saying “Lewis’s analysis of the anti-human trend of modern Western culture has perhaps even more and sharper pertinence now than when it was written. In this vigorous and widely researched book, one of our leading Lewis scholars helps us see this analysis in its full intellectual context, and confirms beyond doubt Lewis’s stature as a genuine public intellectual for our own day as well as his.” Having studied English at Oxford, Theology at Cambridge, and holding a Ph.D. in Divinity from St Andrews, our speaker is a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford and serves as Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, no small feat for a Catholic priest. His acclaimed online video course on C.S. Lewis produced for Hillsdale College has introduced Lewis to many who had never before heard of him. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death in 2013, he helped coordinate a national celebration and worship service honoring Lewis at Westminster Abbey, culminating in the unveiling of a memorial to Lewis in Poets’ Corner. And among all these signal accomplishments, let us not neglect to mention his film role in Max McLean’s acclaimed movie The Most Reluctant Convert and his star turn in the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough, when he handed a pair of spectacles to 007 himself.