When Belief is Agony
I love being a Christian. I mean, I love Jesus too. But I also love all the rest of it: Brunch after church with friends, hylomorphism, late-night Eucharist on Christmas Eve, and carols and stollen and roast beef and friends’...
Marilynne Robinson Imagines the Soul of America
Living there, you’ll be free, if you truly wish to be.” ~Gene Wilder, Pure Imagination The frigid breeze gusting through downtown Des Moines, Iowa, did little to help the Democratic Nominee for President, Joe Biden, as he struggled to project...
On Healing: Learning from Separatists
The idea of a black nation seems so far-fetched as to be ludicrous, but if you entertain it for a minute, even as an impossible dream, it should give you a feeling of wholeness and belonging you’ve never had and...
People Flourish Together: Introducing Issue #2 on Nations and Nationalism
People flourish together. That is the animating conviction behind this edition of Mere Orthodoxy. Because it is not good for us to be alone, it follows that we must needs be bound to one another in relationships of love, mutuality,...
Divine Presence in Dark Nights of the Soul
My argument begins in the most cliché of fashion, I grew up a Christian home-schooler reading the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time at a pretty young age. It was a rainy November day and my mom had built...
A Better Man
Confession: The Magician’s Nephew freaked me out the first time I read it. I was eight, in the back of my family’s van, road tripping across the southeast, and my parents popped in the audiobook in an attempt to keep...
The Answer is to Remember
The Silver Chair is the finest of the Chronicles of Narnia books. In certain ways, the storyline bears the fruit of all the others, and therefore it can take us most deeply into the world Lewis has created for us....
Closest to the Sun
Surely Michael Ward’s mind boiled and brightened in 2003 when he discovered that each of the seven books in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia echo one of the seven spheres of the medieval solar system. The Lion, the...
Reepicheep’s Purity of Heart
Clearly, Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the best of the Narnia novels, and a big part of that is due to a talking mouse. Yes. I’m talking about Reepicheep, the brave, swashbuckling Narnian mouse who is on a quest...
Headaches and Housekeeping, Somebody Likes Prince Caspian?
When I say that Prince Caspian is the best of the Chronicles of Narnia, I say it in the same way that I say I’d rather eat a chopped salad than anything else, or that my favorite pastime is going...