E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
Reihe: Lewis Trilogy
Poe The Completion of C. S. Lewis (1945-1963)
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7105-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
From War to Joy
E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
Reihe: Lewis Trilogy
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7105-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Harry Lee Poe (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the author of twenty books, including The Inklings of Oxford and C. S. Lewis Remembered, as well as numerous articles on Lewis and the Inklings. Poe hosts the annual Inklings Weekend in Montreat, North Carolina, and is a regular speaker on Lewis at universities and other venues worldwide. He served as the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University, where he has taught a course on C. S. Lewis for over twenty years.
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As a freshly minted PhD forty years ago, I began writing reviews in academic journals. My first review was of Walter Hooper’s Through Joy and Beyond, which I continue to regard as the best short biography of Lewis, especially with its rich display of photographs, easily unmatched by any other biography. I followed that review with one of Brothers and Friends, the outstanding edition of the diaries of Warren Lewis edited by Marjorie Lamp Mead and Clyde Kilby. These were followed later by reviews of Michael D. Aeschliman’s The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, James Brabazon’s Dorothy L. Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, edited by Michael H. Macdonald and Andrew A. Tadie.
By 1990, I was too busy with my own writing projects to undertake many book reviews, but I realized that Lewis kept popping up in everything I wrote, whether I was dealing with the Holy Spirit, the nature of the gospel, science and religion, evangelism, thinking from a Christian perspective, youth ministry, or religion and art. Though I wrote only a dozen or so articles specifically about Lewis, he was affecting my thought in many ways. After I led a two-week seminar titled “Apologetics in a Postmodern World” for the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute in Oxford and Cambridge in 1998, Stan Mattson invited me to become the Program Director for the summer institute for the triennial gatherings in 2002, 2005, and 2008. Chuck Colson, who was on the program for that summer institute in Cambridge, sat in on my seminar, which led to his funding of my professorship at Union University, the Charles Colson Chair of Faith and Culture. In 2002 I began teaching my course on C. S. Lewis at Union.
During this period, I was also working on science and faith issues with my colleague Jimmy H. Davis, who holds an endowed chair as a chemistry professor at Union, and with whom I have published four books. I found Lewis extremely helpful in my thinking through the issues related to science and faith, particularly in clarifying that most of the conflict involves philosophy rather than science or faith. Lewis also offered a window on how Christians in the academy might go about thinking of their disciplines from a faith perspective when so many evangelical schools were abandoning the faith and learning project simply because they did not know how to do it. Furthermore, Lewis provided a model for how ordinary people can share their faith through their testimonies at a time when the standard personal evangelism model had moved toward a salesmanship approach that involved “closing the sale.” Finally, Lewis helped me think about how the stories we tell can reflect the culture in which we live or undermine that culture. His stress on how stories “work on” people reflects the choice of Jesus to use parables, but it also provides a basis for a Christian understanding of art.
With this volume, I have now written five books about C. S. Lewis, but Lewis informed all of my other fifteen books. For me, his great value is not as someone who made a splash a long time ago but as someone who can help us think about issues that had not even arisen during his lifetime. Of course, he anticipated many issues that would later arise, such as the ethical questions surrounding genetic engineering, the failure of values, and the diminished role of rational judgment.
With the writing of this third volume of the biography, I developed something of a personal connection with Lewis, because I came to know so many people who knew or studied with Lewis during this last period of his life and who generously extended to me their time and, in some cases, their friendship. Walter Hooper died while I was writing this book, but this project would not have been possible without him, because of his long labors in making the letters, diaries, and uncollected essays and articles available to the world. He was always available to untold thousands of people who made their way to Oxford on the trail of C. S. Lewis. He encouraged so many and always seemed to have that one bit of information at hand to fill in the missing piece of the Lewis puzzle.
Basil Mitchell served as vice president of the Socratic Club with Lewis, succeeding him as president when Lewis moved to Cambridge. One of the great Christian philosophers of the twentieth century, Mitchell had a deep appreciation for Lewis and always invited me to tea in his home when I was in Oxford, where we talked about Lewis and the Socratic Club. Derek Brewer invited me and my daughter Rebecca to dine with him at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he had served as master when we were editing C. S. Lewis Remembered, to which he contributed a chapter. Brewer belonged to the small supper club with Lewis and Hugo Dyson that met a few days after Lewis’s encounter with Elizabeth Anscombe, and his experiences as a pupil of Lewis gave flesh to the accounts of Lewis as tutor. Barbara Reynolds invited me to tea whenever I was in Cambridge. A friend and collaborator with Dorothy L. Sayers in translating Dante, Reynolds had gone to hear Lewis’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Sayers’s request. Reynolds extended herself to me in an unusual way from our first meeting when she realized that I was related to Edgar Allan Poe. Sayers was a great admirer of Poe, and Reynolds had been nominated for a prestigious Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for her biography of Sayers, one of the greatest English mystery writers.
George Watson, who taught for his entire career at St John’s College, Cambridge, invited me into his rooms at St John’s on several occasions when he learned of my interest in Lewis. Watson was not a religious man, but he had a profound appreciation for Lewis as a scholar and an interest in why his academic contribution continues to be important. Bishop Simon Barrington-Ward was the chaplain at Magdalene College, Cambridge, when Lewis was in residence there. He gave me a tour of Magdalene and wrote the preface to C. S. Lewis Remembered. Alastair Fowler was a doctoral student of Lewis in the early 1950s and went on to have an illustrious career at the University of Edinburgh, where we met. We carried on a lengthy correspondence about Lewis for many years. Francis Warner served as Lewis’s research assistant in Cambridge when he collaborated with T. S. Eliot on the revision of the Psalter. I have appreciated his kind support and many courtesies over the years. Much closer to home, I have enjoyed the friendship of Brown Patterson, for many years the dean of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, who studied as a Rhodes scholar with Lewis just before he left Oxford for Cambridge.
Lawrence Harwood, the son of Cecil Harwood, was one of Lewis’s godchildren. We corresponded before we ever met in Oxford in 2005, but that correspondence was the encouragement he needed to publish his own memoir of Lewis. He gave me a glimpse of how Lewis behaved toward children. Though I have no formal acquaintance with Douglas Gresham, I have heard him speak a number of times over the last quarter century and am grateful for the way he has worked to preserve the legacy of Lewis and for how he has provided a picture of life at the Kilns.
Writing a book is only the tip of the iceberg in the book’s publication. So many people are involved after the author has typed the last period. Samuel James, acquisitions editor at Crossway, took an interest in this project when it was planned as only a one-volume biography of Lewis the teenager. All decent authors rewrite their work, either after they have finished a first draft or as they go. The thought of having to go through another editing can be dispiriting, but it must be done. Mistakes are always there. What seemed as clear as day in the writing can actually be as confusing as Bedlam in the reading. Thom Notaro undertook the editing of this volume, and he has been a pleasure to work with in making the book better than it would have been. Once the manuscript was scrubbed and polished, many other skilled hands pitched in to design the interior and cover, plan a marketing strategy, set up interviews and appearances, interest journals and magazines in reviewing the book, and much, much more. I am grateful to Jill Carter, Claire Cook, Josh Dennis, Darcy Difino, Amy Kruis, Edward LaRow, Lauren Milkowski, Cory Smith, Lauren Susanto, and Matt Tully for all they did in the publication process.
Even with the enormous amount of material that Hooper has edited, much remains unpublished at the Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College and in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. I am indebted to the Wade Center and its staff for their great kindness, generosity of spirit, encouragement, and helpfulness during several trips for extended periods of research into the primary documents related to Lewis during his last years. Marjorie Lamp Mead has always been gracious to me and all those who come to use the resources of the Wade. Laura Schmidt and Elaine Hooker went out of their way to find things that I did not know existed. Most of this volume was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Wade Center was closed to visitors, but the staff went to extraordinary lengths to help me utilize resources held by the center. This book could not have been completed without their help. David and Crystal Downing have been encouraging and supportive of this biography, as they are of so many other Lewis and Inklings research projects that make use of the materials at the center. Their creativity and energy have expanded the work of...
