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An Undeceptions podcast. But there is hope, dear. Lots of hope. Oh, yeah, there's a right bit more than hope. Aslan is on the move. Who's Aslan? Who's Aslan? You cheeky little plight-up. What? You don't know, do you? Well, you haven't exactly been here very long. Well, he's only the king of the whole wood.
The top geezer? The real king of Narnia? He's been away for a long while. But he's just got back and he's waiting for you near the stone table. He's waiting for us? You're blooming joking. They don't even know about the prophecy. That's Mr and Mrs Beaver reacting to the lamentable ignorance of the Pevensey children, who don't seem to know anything about the great king, the mighty Aslan.
It's a familiar scene for those who have journeyed in the land of Narnia, the creation of children's author C.S. Lewis. And that might be all you know of the man at the centre of today's episode, which is not surprising considering just how blooming popular the Chronicles of Narnia have been. MUSIC
C.S. Lewis wrote seven books in which children are magically transported to the land of Narnia, where they're frequently called upon by the lion Aslan to protect his creation from a wide range of evils. Since their publication between 1950 and 1956, the Chronicles of Narnia have sold more than 100 million copies in 47 languages.
And despite their dated references and sometimes controversial worldviews, they continue to sell over a million copies a year. They've also inspired theatre performances, radio plays, television series and three major films that earned a healthy $1.5 billion US dollars.
So it's understandable that many people know of Lewis only as that fantastically successful children's author, unaware that he's also the author of a library of books commending and defending the Christian faith. Books like Mere Christianity, Miracles, The Screwtape Letters, and so on.
And his individual essays on religion and philosophy have been printed and reprinted in a host of published collections, including my favourite collection, now out of print, but it sits happily on my bookshelf. Or it will when my stupid library reaches me by boat here in Wheaton College. The collection is called Undeceptions. And yes, it's the inspiration behind the name of our show.
Even less well-known is that Lewis was a revered scholar of medieval and Renaissance English, and his lectures on that theme were wildly popular, for nerdy university lectures anyway, with auditoriums packed to the rafters when he delivered them.
Narnia is wonderful, but it's a pity people don't really know more about the man, his career and his famous town, all of which form the background for the incredible fantasy world he created for his millions of readers. Narnia was born in Oxford, where most of C.S. Lewis's life was lived.
He fell in love with this medieval university town in his early 20s, and he once wrote of it, "...a clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams, a place of visions and of loosening chains, a refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams."
For Lewis, Oxford was five parts intellect and rationality and five parts mystery and imagination. It's exactly what an educational environment should be. He told one of his students that if you could lift Oxford and place it in his native county down in Northern Ireland, you would have heaven.
So that's where we're heading today. Not heaven exactly, nor county down, but Lewis's Oxford. I'm John Dixon, and this is our collection of Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics Master Lectures, a streaming service to satisfy your curiosity and to help you understand the Bible with the world's leading Christian scholars, apart from the couple of courses that I teach there. And you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to get 50% off your first three months subscription with the code undeceptions50.
Each episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture, ethics or literature, that list is getting longer, that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. And if this hour of undeceiving isn't enough, join the Undeceptions Plus community for just $5 Aussie a month.
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This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
Clive Staples Lewis, Jack to his family and friends, was born in Belfast in Ireland on 29 November 1898. His father, Albert Lewis, was a solicitor and his mother, Florence, a clergyman's daughter. His older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis, was known to Jack as Warnie.
Together, Jack and Warnie would create imaginary worlds to pass the time, including Boxen, a fantasy land run by talking animals. Sounds familiar. He also spent hours roaming his family home, Little Lee, exploring still more worlds presented by his father's and mother's huge collection of books.
Language, multiple languages and books became Lewis's solace through difficult years at boarding school, through the dark years of World War I where he was injured on the front line. And of course, languages and books became his world when he settled for his studies at Oxford and Magdalen College where he was appointed Tutorial Fellow in English.
So we're just outside, this is sort of the oldest bit of the college. We've just come through the main gate and that sort of gatehouse, the great tower, the chapel, the cloisters is the original part of the medieval college, goes back to the mid-15th century and then obviously there's various extensions to it, the sort of 19th century neo-gothic quads over to the left there.
I'm in the company of Professor Simon Horriban, a professor of English language and literature at Oxford University and a tutorial fellow at Magdalen College. Yes, he holds C.S. Lewis's exact post about a century after him.
Simon has written tons of things, mainly nerdy scholarly articles about English, as well as books like How English Became English, A Short History of a Global Language, Chaucer's Language, and Does Spelling Matter? The answer is yes.
And for the general public, he literally wrote the book on the English language, titled simply The English Language, in the wonderful Oxford Very Short Introduction series, published by Oxford University Press and a favourite here at Undeceptions. It's not really his day job, but he offered to give me a guided tour of Lewis's Oxford for
For this episode, we're walking along the streets of Oxford and you'll hear everything that comes with it. That's to say, this isn't our usual studio performance. You'll hear street traffic and crowds in places. We're currently standing in front of the building that marked a momentous change in C.S. Lewis' life.
The building we've got directly in front of us there is actually the President's Lodgings. That's where the president of the college lives. It's quite a significant place for Lewis as well actually because it's where he came when he first was appointed a fellow at the college. So that's back in 1925.
And the ceremony they used at the time, which they still use today actually, is where you sort of assemble in the lodgings with all of the fellows of the college lined up alongside you. And you kneel and the president says some stuff in Latin and you pledge to uphold the statutes and so on. And then you go round
each of the fellows of the college and shake hands and each fellow says, "I wish you joy," to which you make no reply, which as Lewis says after the 25th time, it starts to sound a bit strange. But I think what's really intriguing about that is the word joy because it becomes so significant for Lewis.
in the rest of his life. You know, the idea of joy, surprised by joy. Joy is this sort of longing, this spiritual yearning that he feels. It's the technical term he gives it. And of course joy as in Joy Davidman, who becomes his wife later on.
Surprised by Joy is actually the title of Lewis's autobiography. Well, it's sort of an autobiography. It's more an intellectual odyssey. For Lewis, joy isn't happiness, but a yearning for something beyond ourselves that disappears even as we grasp it.
An unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction, he writes. It might almost equally be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief, but then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. His whole life was a search for joy.
But he came close to never experiencing it. Lewis had made it to Oxford on a scholarship, but the outbreak of World War One upended his plans for a higher education. He volunteered for the Oxford University Officers Training Corps. So we're standing outside Keeble College now, which is where Lewis came in 1917 to do his training for going into the First World War.
He spent a lot of time learning how to march and doing all the basics of army training. Moving from Univ into Keeble, he found
quite a step down. He didn't find his rooms very comfortable. He longed for his own college. At first he was allowed to return... It's not the prettiest of all colleges. No, that's right. I think it was quite spartan, especially at that time. So they allowed him to go back at weekends and then they stopped that and he had to just live here full time.
and but because of the chance and randomness of the alphabet he found himself sharing a room with a man called patrick moore paddy moore they then ended up going into the somerset light infantry together although they weren't posted to the same place and they became very good friends and
When they went off into battle, they made a kind of agreement that if one of them should be killed, the other one would look after the surviving parent of the other. And Paddy Moore was killed. And so Lewis stuck with that agreement. And when he came back to Oxford, he looked after his mother, Mrs. Moore,
and her daughter Maureen. It was a pretty complicated arrangement because as an undergraduate you're supposed to live in college so at the same time as he was trying to live off quite a meagre scholarly allowance he was also responsible for Mrs Moore and her daughter. And then they came when he bought his house up in Headington in 1930 with Mrs Moore they went in together in buying the house and she lived with him right the way up into the 1950s until she died.
So really that just chance encounter at Keeble was quite important for Lewis's subsequent life. Some people have said there was something untoward about Lewis and Mrs Moore. Is there any indication of that? Or was he just being a good loyal friend? It's really hard to know. There isn't any real evidence.
Hey, if you're an Undeceptions Plus subscriber, you'll get a lot more on this interesting theme in your extras. But for the rest of us, let's not get distracted. Lewis arrived in France with the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, where he spent part of 1917 and 18, before being wounded by a German shell and evacuated to England.
He rarely spoke about the horrors of World War I. It was a conscious choice. The war might have had his body, but it could not have his mind. He in fact wrote, "I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight from reality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier."
So Lewis was finally free to pursue his beloved Oxford. Only there was one more barrier to face. Maybe he wasn't smart enough. When he came up in 1917, you had to sit, even though you got in, he'd got a scholarship, you had to sit what's called responsions, which was...
three examinations, one in Latin, one in Greek. This is all students, no matter what subject you're doing. Good old days. Yeah, yeah. That's in Greek and mathematics. And of course he was fine with the Latin and the Greek, but he was terrible at maths. And in fact he failed responsions. And he then spent that summer term, well he was also training for the army,
getting some maths tuition to try and basically mug up his maths. He then went into the army and served, came back as I said in 1919 and luckily for Lewis the university had decided that anyone who had served in the war was to be excused responsions. So he never actually had to sit the maths again because one wonders whether he would have ever passed it. That's funny. So that, yeah, that was convenient for him.
Lewis certainly rewarded Oxford's faith in him. He went on to receive a first in what's called Honor Moderations, the mods, basically Greek and Latin language, in 1920. And then he got a first in what's called Greats, that's philosophy and ancient history, in 1922. Then, to improve his chances at obtaining an academic position, he completed a two-year degree in English in just one year. Receiving
receiving another first. Lewis earned a triple first, that's first class honours, three times. This is a rare achievement and he was elected a fellow and tutor in English literature at Magdalen College. He held the position for almost 30 years.
Am I right that you essentially hold the same chair? It's the same post that Lewis had, yeah. It's not actually technically a chair in the sense it's a kind of tutorial fellowship and that's an important difference for Lewis because it meant, you know, it's sort of a post that comes with lots of undergraduate teaching
And of course, it's partly the reason why Lewis then moved to Cambridge in 1954, was for a professorial chair, which then becomes much more of a kind of research, graduate teaching kind of position. Lewis having done nearly 30 years here at Magdalen reading student essays, sort of felt like he'd done it.
But yes, I hold the same position as an English tutor. Is that a fun idea or weird or something else that you hold Lewis's post at Oxford University? It's kind of terrifying in lots of ways because of course one doesn't really want to be compared with Lewis because he's just so incredibly learned.
But it's inspiring, definitely, because he did so much with it, made such an amazing contribution as a scholar, as a tutor as well, I think. One can learn a lot from Lewis. As a lecturer, people went to Lewis's lectures, they were popular.
People write about Lewis's tutorials in a way that shows that they found them incredibly helpful, encouraging, stimulating. So it's inspiring but a little intimidating. And of course Lewis in those days, English was a new subject in the 1920s. He was the first English tutor at Magdalen. Given that as your specialty, I have a question we are always raising on Undeceptions.
People say that the medieval period was the Dark Ages. From a literary point of view, surely not. No, exactly. I mean Lewis would be outraged by that. I mean he's obviously aware of that.
But he felt there was so much that we could learn from the Middle Ages and that they were so much more informed than we give them credit for. But also, even where they were wrong, they were wrong in very interesting ways. His understanding of the medieval cosmos, which has been proved to be wrong, still, he felt, informs us an awful lot about the nature of the world. But you've got to think 200 years from now,
what will they be saying about some of our firm theories about the universe? Yeah, he was very against presentism, you know, the idea that we are much more learned because that's just where we happen to be. Chronological snobbery, right? Exactly, yeah, exactly.
But that wasn't his idea, was it? Should we walk somewhere? Yeah, sure. I was going to point out Lewis's rooms, actually. Oh, please, yes. So we're standing in front of what's called the New Building, but that's obviously a classic Oxford use of the word new because it actually goes back to 1720. And this is where, when he came, he was given rooms in this building, a set, it's called, so a set of three rooms which he lived in. It's the two windows just to the right of the...
rather beautiful red flowers you can see in the window boxes. He had those two rooms on the second, sort of middle floor of those. And then the room, he had a sitting room at the back which overlooks the deer park. And he said in a letter to his father, you know, his rooms are beautiful beyond expectation. It feels like you're in the middle of the countryside, really. And all you could hear was the deer. And it's in those rooms that there's that
moment in 'Surprised by Joy' where he describes his conversion to theism. He says, you know, 'You must pitch me in those rooms in Magdalen'. This is the Trinity term, the summer term of 1929. He says, 'You must pitch me in those rooms at Magdalen night after night, resisting the approach of him who I so earnestly desired not to meet'.
You know, that's that famous line about the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England, when he kneels down and prays. And that's his conversion to theism, which happened in exactly that spot. People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about man's search for God. To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse's search for the cat,
Remember, I had always wanted above all things not to be interfered with. I had wanted to call my soul my own. I had been far more anxious to avoid suffering than to achieve delight. I had always aimed at limited liabilities. But now, what had been an ideal became a command, and what might not be expected of one. Doubtless, by definition, God was reason itself.
But would he also be "reasonable" in that other more comfortable sense? Not the slightest assurance on that score was offered me. Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even all or nothing. I think that stage had been passed on the bus top when I unbuckled my armor and the snowman started to melt. Now the demand was simply "all".
You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted for even a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me,
In the Trinity term of 1929, I gave in and admitted that God was God and knelt and prayed. Perhaps that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing. The divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.
The prodigal son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 1955
Lewis had come only to the point of knowing there was an almighty God who demanded submission. His journey to Christianity proper had a few hurdles to jump. Part of that journey involved strolling through the Deer Park at the back of Magdalen College with some other important scholars. So this is called Addison's Walk, named after the 18th century essayist Joseph Addison, who was a fellow here.
Lewis loved it. He would come here every morning before he went to chapel. He would come and do the loop, this kind of circular walk around this big water meadow.
And it was here, walking down Addison's walk, or Adder's as he always called it, that he was walking one night after dinner in the hall with Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien, or Tollers as he called him. Hugo Dyson was a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien's. They met at the University of Reading where Dyson was teaching English.
Dyson was an expert on Shakespeare, and a few years later he got a fellowship with Oxford's Merton College. J.R.R. Tolkien, of course, as many of our listeners will know, is best known for his writing of the fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. Academically, though, he was a giant in the realm of philology, the study of the structure, historical development of, and relationships between languages.
Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Oxford's Pembroke College. Lewis, Dyson and Tolkien would become three of the founding members of that famous Oxford literary society, the Inklings. More about that later. For now, just imagine three impressive minds going for a late night stroll.
Tolkien and Dyson walking down Alison's walk, so this would have been sort of about 10 o'clock at night. And what was important about that walk was the subject of it was about the notion of Christianity and mythology, which was kind of central to Lewis's objections to Christianity, is that he understood he'd converted to theism by now,
But he saw Christianity as just another one of the myths. And a later one that borrowed. Exactly, yeah. He had a very sound understanding of classical mythology, of course, from his undergraduate degree.
He also loved Norse mythology and Celtic mythology. In fact, he said of all of them, Norse was the one that attracted him most. And he could see all the similarities in them. So he understood them all to be pointing towards something. But why privilege Christianity over the others? And it was this conversation, particularly when...
Tolkien opened up to him the idea that Christianity could be the true myth and that the others are simply pointing towards it. There are sort of glimpses of the reality in those, but that Christianity has a claim to be what he called a true myth. And that seemed to really then help Lewis to get over that final step.
It's a fascinating idea. Instead of outright denying and denouncing pagan myths, Tolkien helped Lewis see that these myths themselves can be thought of as pointers to ultimate reality, a reality that finds a concrete historical centre point in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
But Tolkien was by no means the first to think of things this way. It was in fact a very common theme in the Christian proclamation of the gospel in the first few centuries of the church.
People like Justin Martyr in the early 2nd century, Athenagoras in the late 2nd century, as well as the great 3rd century Christian intellectuals like Tertullian, Minucius Felix, and Lactantius all used the best of pagan philosophy and story to show that Christianity wasn't merely the negation of human wisdom, but its fulfillment. Indeed, the fulfillment of all humanity's deepest desires.
These thinkers all felt at ease doing this because there is a classic example of the Apostle Paul doing it in the New Testament. When he preached in Athens in the Areopagus, a kind of high court of ideas, Paul didn't just rebuke his pagan Greek audience for their idol worship. He did do that a little bit.
He also said that the altar to an unknown god there in Athens was a kind of window to the god who could be known.
And he even approvingly quoted pagan hymns to the highest god Zeus, one written by Cleanthes, another by Aratus, to make the point that the best of Greek thought had already partially stumbled across the founding principle of Christianity, that God is the source of all creation, not part of creation, and that we humans are the creator's offspring.
Tolkien, Dyson, and ultimately Lewis were all echoing a very ancient approach to the public explanation of the Christian faith.
They went back to the new buildings, walked up and down the colonnade in front of it for a while, and then he let Tolkien out of a little side gate back to Merton College at 3am and went back into his room to talk longer with Dyson. So it was a really very late-night affair. But he identifies that particular moment in Surprised by Joy as being really important for his understanding of those ideas. It's such a... When you compare it to the kind of...
defensive, anti-world, conservative Christianity you sometimes get today. That view of Tolkien and then C.S. Lewis is so positive, isn't it? So for the world. Yeah. As in the Greeks had stumbled across truths that were pointers to the great truth. Yeah. It wasn't anti. I mean, you often...
find people sort of saying, "Oh, no, no, no, the ancient myths aren't like Christianity. They're totally different." But Lewis was very happy to embrace it all. - No, exactly. And I think it comes back to our idea that, you know, the dark ages or the idea that we're always progressing beyond something and therefore leaving it behind us and making it appear redundant. You know, Lewis is very open to the idea that there were these great thinkers of the past who had kind of, you know, access to some truth which we can benefit from.
We've stopped at this particular point here on Addison's Walk because there's a plaque here that has a, this is at the gates of the back of the Deer Park, which has a poem that Lewis wrote, which actually refers specifically to Addison's Walk. Can I impose on you to read it for us so that we can have this in the show? It's called 'What the Bird Said Early in the Year'. I heard in Addison's Walk a bird sing clear.
This year the summer will come true, this year, this year. Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees, this year. Nor want of rain destroy the peas, this year. Time's nature will no more defeat you, nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you. This time they will not lead you round and back to autumn, one year older by the well-worn track, this year, this year. As all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell. Often deceived, yet open once again your heart. Quick, quick, quick, quick. The gates are drawn apart.
The gates had certainly opened for Lewis. The great mythologist, the lover of Greek legends and Norse sagas had finally found what he believed they were all pointing to. His life's journey had reached a mountaintop, but his exploration of Oxford and all that it had to offer was only just beginning. And so as an English scholar, what was he like? Everyone knows his, you know, they either know his fiction books or they know his Christian apologetics.
Actually, his day job was neither of those. No, that's right. Yeah, it's intriguing really because he spent much of his life reading student essays on medieval and Renaissance literature and in the evening writing his books on that subject. And he made an amazing contribution really
partly because of his immense wide reading in the original sources. So he didn't have a lot of time for criticism, other people's writings. He just went back to the original sources. Lewis's first big book on medieval literature was a book called Allegory of Love. It's about medieval love, poetry really, and the widespread use of the allegorical form.
"Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations. Being alive, it has the privilege of always moving, yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we still are. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds." C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love A Study in Medieval Tradition
He wrote about some of the central texts of medieval allegorical writing. So the Romance of the Rose, which is a medieval French work. It's all about a lover trying to approach a rose and getting rebuffed by various different figures.
that he has to negotiate on the way. Lewis was fascinated by that and by its legacy, because it was so hugely influential in writers like Chaucer. There's a whole chapter about Chaucer. Langland, who wrote this great allegorical work. Piers Plowman. So it was intellectual history as well as literary criticism. Exactly. Because that was so influential for the whole of the Middle Ages, really.
One of the other really important academic contributions that Lewis made was his work on 16th century English literature called The Oxford History of English Literature. In it, Lewis continued to express his big idea that we heard earlier from Simon. He tried to debunk the notion that there was this real break between the dark medieval period and the Renaissance period.
Lewis reckoned it had been hugely overplayed, and he was sceptical about that disjunction we still hear today. He actually gave lectures on the idea that, you know, the Renaissance never actually happened. It's just been invented. And in fact, we're now walking past the examination schools, which is where he would have given his lectures. So another...
very popular lecture course he gave at the time was called, again, he's not big on titles, Lewis. He called them the prolegomenon to medieval literature. And then there was a follow-up, the prolegomenon to Renaissance literature. But, you know, people used to turn up in droves to it. You know, people who were there have described it
they were really popular because he was a very engaging lecturer. And this is before he was famous for the things he became famous for? Yeah, exactly. So what did he have as a lecturer? I mean, I don't think of him as a great rhetorician or anything, but was he? He was, yeah, exactly. He was. I've heard those tapes, the BBC tapes, or, you know, they've got just a few minutes of him speaking, and I thought, well, I'd fall asleep in that. Yeah, exactly.
The BBC tapes we're talking about here are a series of 15-minute live broadcasts that Lewis was invited to give for the BBC from 1941 to 1944 during World War II. The BBC had a monopoly on broadcasting during the war and religious programming that was broad enough to appeal to the troops was in high demand. Lewis was perfect.
His talks formed the backbone of his extremely popular book, Mere Christianity. Almost certainly, God is not in time. His life doesn't consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to him at 10.30 tonight, he hasn't got to listen to them all in that one little snippet, which we call 10.30.
10:30 and every other moment from the beginning to the end of the world is always the present for him.
I think you're absolutely right. They're different because those radio broadcasts, he was told that he could only speak for a certain amount of time. They had to be read in advance to be checked by the BBC so the content was okay, check the timing was right. And then he was required to read them and he couldn't change them in any way.
So that didn't really play to his strengths as what was when he gave his lectures He always made a point of not reading from the script. He had notes And he had he had his notes and he had another little booklet which was called thickening which was all the extra bits that he might add in if he felt like it and he spoke really quite spontaneously and They were funny There were lots of jokes in them people tried not to laugh too much because they wanted to make sure they didn't miss the next bit
And he also spent a lot of time as part of what was called the Socratic Club, where he was, it was a kind of debating society that he was involved in here in Oxford. And I think he, again, he was known to be a great performer at that.
The Socratic Club was something like a debating society, established in 1942 by the Oxford Pastorate, a group of Christian evangelicals who wanted to provide Oxford students with a more lively and engaging version of the Christian faith. They still do great work to this day. Interestingly, the majority of Socratic Club members were women, drawn from Oxford's all-women colleges.
Lewis was invited to be the club's senior member, a don who would take responsibility for the organisation. The way it worked was two participants would be invited to present contrasting opinions on a topic. Lewis spoke a few times a year and it always grew a big crowd.
On one of these occasions, he debated Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe about one aspect of his approach to miracles, outlined in his book by the same name. Lewis admitted that Anscombe exposed a problem with one of his proofs, not his conclusion, with which she fully agreed, but one of his arguments about naturalism, about how much we can know about the world if there is nothing but nature.
We've got more on that particular topic in an upcoming episode. For now, let's head back to the streets of Oxford.
So were there ever Q&A's at these lectures or was that not really in vogue in those days? Apparently he was renowned for walking in right on the time that it was supposed to start and immediately starting to lecture and then he would finish his lecture and be walking out the room just as he finished. So I don't think there was ever a time for a Q&A. I don't know if that was strategic or whether he just was always a bit late for something.
But Lewis's popular appeal and enduring fame were established by his books. Titles like The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, and The Screwtape Letters remain bestsellers to this day. And of course, The Chronicles of Narnia. More on all of that in a moment.
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My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïve?
It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. Now, that might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time, the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not, and if it was proved, they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing, and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.
But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily true or false, but as academic or practical, outworn or contemporary, conventional or ruthless.
Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true. Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous, that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.
That's British comedian John Cleese reading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, the imaginary correspondence of a senior devil to his junior, on how best to keep human beings away from a real life-changing encounter with God. Honestly, the Cleese production, while pretty old, is brilliant.
Cleese interprets the voice of the demons in a masterful way. Evil is portrayed as intellectual, proud, disdainful, cold, but not in a cliched, dastardly manner. I love it. Anyway, by 1942, Lewis was an international star, thanks to Screwtape's success in America.
But the interesting thing is that this popular acclaim soured his reputation among some of his fellow Oxford dons. They felt he'd sort of betrayed his academic birthright. Lewis was in fact passed over three times for prestigious university appointments over the next 12 years. Yet Oxford remained the centre of Lewis's world.
There's no more than 300 metres between University College, where Lewis first came to study, and Magdalen College, where he first came to teach. His home, the Kilns, was a short bike ride or bus ride up the hill to the suburb of Headington. Even when Lewis was offered a very prestigious position at Cambridge University later in life, he only agreed to it because it wouldn't require him to move out of Oxford.
This brings Simon and me back to Oxford's High Street and one very significant place on our walking tour.
So now we're coming past the University Church and the reason I'm bringing you past this is because this is where in 1941 Lewis gave his famous sermon, The Weight of Glory, one of his university sermons basically. I know it well. Yeah. You have never met an ordinary man, he says. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly.
So this is the University Church where services are regularly held during the university term time. That's the famous pulpit which was put in in the 1830s. The first vicar of the University Church to preach from it was John Henry Newman. So taking that pulpit must have been quite intimidating.
It's where John Keeble preached his sermon, you know, thought to have kicked off the Oxford movement. Yeah, and it's there that Lewis preached the weight of glory. The weight of glory was preached in the Church of St Mary the Virgin on June 8th, 1941, and published later the same year. In it, C.S. Lewis touches on the joy that he and every human being instinctively longs for but can't quite attain.
Lewis's biographer and friend of this show, Alistair McGrath, describes it this way. We all long for something, only to find our hopes dashed and frustrated when we actually achieve or attain it. So how is this common human experience to be interpreted? Lewis argues that the Christian faith interprets this longing as a clue to the true goal of human nature.
God is the ultimate end of the human soul, the only source of human happiness and joy. Just as physical hunger points to a real human need which can be met through food, so this spiritual hunger corresponds to a real need which can be met through God. Lewis himself describes it as a desire for a far-off country we know but have never visited.
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you, the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like nostalgia and romanticism and adolescence.
The secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent. We grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves. The secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it
because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.
Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it. What he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.
The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them. It was not in them, it came only through them. And what came through them was longing. These things, the beauty, the memory of our own past, are good images of what we really desire.
One of my favorite passages from this sermon comes at the very end, where Lewis speaks of the glory that rests on every human being.
I'm going to get Yannick to read it, but you've got to picture this as being preached to a packed congregation in the large chapel of the University Church of St Mary. The load or weight or burden of my neighbour's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
It is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another. All friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit, immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play.
but our merriment must be of that kind, and it is, in fact, the merriest kind, which exists between two people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously. No flippancy, no superiority, no presumption, and our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we loved the sinner, no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
Next, to the Blessed Sacrament itself, he means the bread and wine of communion. Your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.
1941 was a huge year for Lewis. He was not only doing all the teaching expected of an Oxford Don, he was acting as the Vice President of Magdalen College, speaking on the BBC, travelling the country talking to Royal Air Force personnel and writing still more books.
So it's kind of appropriate that just outside St Mary's Church, where he preached this famous sermon in 1941, there's a physical link, sort of, to Lewis's most famous fantasy.
So I've brought you to this little, this is called St Mary's Passage and you'll notice that there's a big crowd of people who've just gone past exactly where we're heading. So this is very much on the tourist trail. And it's the reason being that this little doorway here is sometimes suggested that it's the moment, the place where Lewis got the idea for Narnia, for the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We just saw that family take a photo in front of a lion. Is that a lion? So, yes. So what we've got here is the
a door that comes out of the University Church. Right opposite there's this doorway with what looks like a lion, as you said, carved into the wooden door. And then around the frame are these two rather splendid golden fauns with their little pan pipes. - Mr Tumnus. - Exactly. And then straight ahead of us is a Victorian lamp post. - Oh, indeed. - And so the story that everyone that we've just seen will have been told is that one day Lewis came out of this door of the University Church
blanket of snow, it's the middle of winter, and there is the conjunction of all the central features of the Narnia story: the lamppost of lantern waste, Mr Tumnus, or two Mr Tumnuses, and carved into the doorway the face of a lion.
It's a good story. It's a lovely story. It's not true, unfortunately. And there's a number of reasons why we know that. One is that Lewis actually wrote a whole essay about how the Narnia stories came to him.
And in fact what he tells us is that he started seeing pictures in his imagination in his early teens. And he said that the picture that he first saw was of a faun in a snowy wood holding a set of parcels and an umbrella and another one of a witch on a sleigh. And it's only much later on in his forties that he decided
to see if he could write a story using these images. And he says, "At that point I was dreaming a lot about lions, and at that point Aslan bounded in." And so one of the things that's amazing about Lewis is all his books tend to go back to much earlier ideas, often ones that he's tried out in some different form before. He's maybe written a poem about something, and then he starts trying to think about how he might use it later, and then he comes back to it later on.
And the idea is still there, fully formed, but he somehow uses it in a different way. And it seems to be the case with the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that it goes right back to his childhood. So this idea of it suddenly coming to him here when he's in Oxford doesn't really work. Not least because actually that looks like a lion, but it's actually a green man, which is quite a common symbol. And not a lion at all.
We've got a whole episode on the world of Narnia coming later this season.
For now, let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. In fact, I'm going to do better than that. Here's a few minutes of C.S. Lewis's words on Jesus. From his essay, What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ? It's published in the out-of-print collection of Lewis's essays titled, you guessed it, Undeceptions. Here, it's read by our house voice actor, Yannick Laurie. Thanks, Yannick.
What are we to make of Jesus Christ? On the one hand, you have got the almost generally admitted depth and sanity of his moral teaching, which is not very seriously questioned.
even by those who are opposed to Christianity. In fact, I find that when I am arguing with very anti-God people that they rather make a point of saying: "I am entirely in favor of the moral teaching of Christianity." And there seems to be a general agreement that in the teaching of this man and of his immediate followers moral truth is exhibited at its purest and best.
It is not sloppy idealism, it is full of wisdom and shrewdness. The whole thing is realistic, fresh to the highest degree, the product of a sane mind. That is one phenomenon. The other phenomenon is the quite appalling nature of this man's theological remarks. You all know what I mean. And I want rather to stress the point that the appalling claim which this man seems to be making is not merely made at one moment of his career.
There is, of course, the one moment which led to his execution, the moment at which the High Priest said to him: "Who are you? I am the Anointed, the Son of the uncreated God, and you shall see me appearing at the end of all history as the judge of the universe." But that claim, in fact, does not rest on this one dramatic moment.
When you look into his conversation, you will find this sort of claim running throughout the whole thing. For instance, he went about saying to people: "I forgive your sins." Now, it is quite natural for a man to forgive something you do to him. Thus, if somebody cheats me out of five pounds, it is quite possible and reasonable for me to say: "Well, I forgive him."
We will say no more about it. What on earth would you say if somebody had done you out of five pounds and I said, "That's all right, I forgive him." Sometimes the statements put forward the assumption that he, the speaker, is completely without sin or fault. This is always the attitude, "You to whom I am talking are all sinners,
And he never remotely suggests that this same reproach can be brought against him. He says again: "I am the begotten of the one God, before Abraham was I AM." And remember what the words "I AM" were in Hebrew. They were the name of God, which must not be spoken by any human being, the name which it was death to utter. Well, that is the other side.
On the one side, clear definite moral teaching, on the other, claims which, if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men. There is no halfway house, and there is no parallel in other religions. If you had gone to Buddha and asked him, "Are you the son of Brahma?" He would have said, "My son, you are still in the veil of illusion."
If you had gone to Socrates and asked, "Are you Zeus?" He would have laughed at you. If you had gone to Muhammad and asked, "Are you Allah?" He would have rent his clothes and then cut your head off. If you had asked Confucius, "Are you heaven?"
I think he would have probably replied: "Remarks which are not in accordance with nature are in bad taste." The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion which undermines the whole mind of man. If you think you are a poached egg when you are looking for a piece of toast to suit you, you may be saying:
But if you think you are God, there is no chance for you. We may note in passing that he was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met him. He produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval. What are we to do about reconciling the two contradictory phenomena? What are we to make of Christ?
There is no question of what we can make of him, it is entirely a question of what he intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story. The things he says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say "this is the truth about the universe, this is the way you want to go", but he says "I am the truth and the way and the life".
He says no man can reach absolute reality except through me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved. He says, if you are ashamed of me, if when you hear this call you turn the other way,
I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you away from God and away from me, whatever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first, you will be last. Come to me. Everyone who is carrying a heavy load, I will set that right.
Well, you can press play now.
There's a C.S. Lewis story attached to so many parts of Oxford, but one place will always be on the pilgrimage trail for his fans, the famous Eagle and Child pub that played host to one of the most famous writing clubs in English history. When we visited it, it was all boarded up having just been bought by a hotel company. I'm hoping they'll do something marvellous and respectful with it.
We're standing outside a very sorry looking eagle and child, cobwebs and it hasn't been open since the pandemic but in Lewis's day this was where the Inklings, that group of writers, would regularly congregate on a Tuesday lunchtime. They had two meeting points in the week. The Tuesday
lunch times in the Eagle and Child or what they called the Bird and Baby and then on a Thursday night in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen and they differed what they did at them because the Thursday night was the meeting where they would read out bits of their work in progress and for Lewis that was things like
The Problem of Pain, which is his first work of Christian apologetics, is what really launched him as an apologist, of course, because it was reading The Problem of Pain by Jimmy Welch, who then got the BBC interested in doing the broadcast talks and also his first science fiction book.
The Out of the Silent Planet was read to the Inklings, and so was The Great Divorce. Why were they called the Inklings? It was actually a name that they didn't make up themselves. When Lewis was at UNIV, there was an undergraduate that was there after Lewis left called Edward Tangy Lean.
who was doing PPE and he set up a group called the Inklings at which he and his fellow undergraduates would read out some of their work in progress and he invited a few senior members one of whom was Tolkien and one of whom was Lewis and like a lot of student groups it kind of dwindled after a bit when people left and then Lewis and the people immediately in the Lewis circle carried on the tradition
of meeting and reading each other's works and they took that name and borrowed it. And it's sort of the reason why Inkling is such a nice name for it of course is it's an inkling as a kind of notion, a half-baked idea, something you're thinking about but also it's a nice pun because it sounds like someone who dabbles in ink. And so they used it for that reason.
I think one of the other important defining features of the Inklings that's easy to forget is that they were Christians. So it wasn't just people writing, it was people who were writing and interested in Christianity. And although they did spend a lot of time reading each other's works and commenting on them, so this was also the period of course when Tolkien is writing what was called the New Hobbit book, which is what became Lord of the Rings,
That was obviously a major feature of it. But there was also quite a mixed group of people. Warnie Lewis was writing works on 17th century French history. Lewis's doctor, Humphrey Havard, would come along and he would sometimes read accounts of his own latest mountaineering expedition. So it was quite a diverse collection. But at the same time they also discussed questions of morality or Christian belief or
So, for instance, there's records of a long discussion they had about cremation or whether dogs have souls. And, you know, they sort of... We know this a bit because Warnie Lewis kept a diary at the time where he would... So there were no official minutes kept of the meetings. But, you know, he tended to be the sort of... So they'd literally sit in there while...
An English pub is doing what an English pub does and reading to each other. Well, actually, no, the reading happened more in the rooms. This was probably more discussion. But they had their own little room at the back called the rabbit room. So they were kind of set off from everybody else. So how long did they meet for as the Inklings? Well, it started sort of at the end of the 30s and carried on to the end of the 40s.
pretty consistently. By the end of the 40s it was starting to dwindle, partly because one of the really important members, Charles Williams,
who had moved to Oxford during the war. He worked for the Oxford University Press based in London. But when they moved out to Oxford in the war, he came and met Lewis and they became really good friends. And he became a really important member of the Inklings, although rather a divisive character because Tolkien wasn't so fond of him. And that actually had an impact on their friendship.
On Lewis and Tolkien's friendship? Yeah. And they started to kind of drift apart a bit because Tolkien couldn't really understand why he was so enamoured of Williams. Williams was influential for Lewis in things like that hideous strength, writing, you know, those kinds of, you know, psychological thrillers, shockers, as Lewis called them. But in 1945, Lewis was coming to one of the Tuesday morning meetings here and...
Williams was laid up in hospital having had an operation just up the road there at the end of St Giles in the Radcliffe Infirmary. And so Lewis diverted his journey to take a book for Williams to read and to take any messages he had for the rest of the gang down here at the Eagle and Child. But he arrived to find that Williams had died completely unexpectedly and Lewis was really distraught by this. And again, I think that has an impact on the Inklings beginning to dwindle because he was such a core member.
And in fact, the landlord of the pub died as well in that period. And, you know, Warnie talks about how, you know, how important he was as a character in keeping that group going. So they carried on meeting on a Tuesday, even after Lewis had gone to Cambridge. So that's into the mid 50s. But they switched it to a Monday so that Lewis could continue.
come down here, have a Monday morning meeting, have a few pints, and then they'd drive him up to the train station at the road, and then he would get the train to Cambridge. Really? So he still managed to keep it going. But I think the Thursdays, they sort of drifted away by the end of the 40s, really.
There was something else taking up Lewis's attention at this time. A certain American woman called Joy Davidman
Joy started off as a fan of Lewis's books. She was told by a friend who knew Lewis that he answered all his mail. So she wrote to him and he wrote back and they corresponded for a number of years. None of those early letters survives, but it's clear they developed a deepening friendship. Then in 1952, she announced that she was coming to England to meet him. A date was set. They would meet at a hotel for lunch.
Lewis's brother, Warney, would describe her, and I'm quoting, as a Christian convert of Jewish race, medium height, good figure, horn-rimmed specs, quite extraordinarily uninhibited. Excuse me, I'm here to meet Mr C.S. Lewis, the writer. Yes, madam. Well, do you know what he looks like? No, madam. Well, he doesn't know what I look like either. Yes, madam. Any ideas? No.
Anybody here called Lewis?
That's an amusing insight into what happens when American and English cultures clash. From the 1993 film Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Deborah Winger as Joy Davidman, the woman Lewis came to love. Shadowlands has been criticised for portraying this whole relationship as just one great big love affair, but it was rather more complicated than that.
Well, she's Jewish by origin and she was an atheist for a period and she was coming to faith and Lewis's books were really important to her in that process. And they met, in fact, at the Eastgate pub up on the High Street by the examination schools and had lunch there. And there are some interesting accounts of that first encounter and subsequent ones where she was obviously quite
you know, sort of surprisingly outspoken. And, you know, as an American coming into what was a really quite, you know, a male Oxford world where people were quite restrained, she was quite outspoken. But in a way that Lewis evidently found quite refreshing. She was obviously, you know,
they were intellectually on the same level and could have very interesting discussions about issues of faith. She also had similar interests, literary interests, in fantasy, in science fiction and so on. There is a letter that survives from their early correspondence about an Arthur C. Clarke novel that they've both been reading that shows that they talked about literary matters and that Lewis was really genuinely interested in what she thought about things.
And so, yeah, she came to Oxford and while she was here, she also, her marriage, she was married, her marriage was in trouble and her husband was having an affair with a friend of hers and she came to Lewis to ask what she should do about, you know, returning to Oxford.
America where she had this difficult relationship. They then got divorced and Lewis at that point agreed to a civil marriage with her which was essentially something he was going to keep quiet but it would enable her to apply for British citizenship.
And so here just a few doors down from the Eagle and Child we're at what is now 42 St Giles and Dentists but in those days was actually the Oxford Registry Office and it was here that they got married. They actually have a
a copy of the certificate, the marriage certificate on the wall. Really? It's still marked as that particular venue. But of course, the idea behind that was that people didn't know, he didn't tell people. He kept that private side of his life quite separate. But it wasn't intended that it would be a proper marriage in the sense that it needed to be. It was a convenience for her in terms of her citizenship status.
keep her two young sons here in Britain away from a difficult relationship. And it was only shortly after that that she discovered she had terminal cancer.
And at that point, I think Lewis recognised the true strength of his feelings for her. And at that point, he then decided that what he really wanted to do was have a full Christian ceremony and have a proper marriage. And they then get married again up at the hospital in Headington where she was.
Joy's health went up and down, but the cancer was never far away. Just three years after their second marriage, Joy died. And of course, that's the point where Lewis then writes, a grief observed.
which is a very heart-wrenchingly honest and open account of what he's going through. For somebody who wrote quite an academic work about pain back in 1940, it's an interesting return to that question and recognising that the reality is much harder in some ways to deal with. No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,
I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says, or perhaps hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me.
I dread the moments when the house is empty, if only they would talk to one another and not to me. There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much. Not so very much after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called "resources". People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly.
One is ashamed to listen to this voice, but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory, and all this common sense vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace. How far have I got? Just as far, I think, as a widower of another sort who would stop, leaning on his spade, and say in answer to our inquiry, "Thank ye. Mustn't grumble. I do miss her something dreadful.
But they say these things are sent to try us. We have come to the same point, he with his spade and I, who am not now much good at digging, with my own instrument. But of course, one must take "sent to try us" the right way. God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't.
In this trial, he makes us occupy the dock, the witness box and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down." C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
And Lewis himself died, that was 1960, three years after that. Quite young, really, 65, up in his house in Headington and he's buried at the Holy Trinity Church. Was it a short period of ill health for him? Or...
extended. It was fairly short actually. There was a period where earlier than that where he'd been hospitalized and it was thought that he might not recover from that but he did make a full recovery from that and then he it was a fairly short period of ill health. He was still working up to the point you know shortly beforehand but then realized he couldn't. We are not metaphorically but in very truth a divine work of art
something that God is making and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again, we come up against what I have called the intolerable compliment. Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble. He may be content to let it go, even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life,
the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child. He will take endless trouble and would doubtless thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute,
In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny. But then, we are wishing not for more love, but for less. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.
Well, I've moved to Wheaton, Illinois, in the US, where I've taken up a newly endowed chair. I'm apparently now the Gene Kwame Distinguished Professor at Wheaton College and Distinguished Scholar in Public Christianity. My darling Buff protests the title by calling it the Professor Thingy. Fair enough.
But one of the wonderful things about my new role is that Wheaton College frees me up to continue Undeceptions. More than that, to make it thrive. And that's what we're planning for. If you like what we're doing, there are a bunch of things you can do for us to be part of the team. And we need all of them. You can head to Apple Podcasts and give us a review. Apparently that does something magical to the algorithms for us.
You can go to underceptions.com and pick up one of our t-shirts from the store. And if you really want to help our expanding team, please consider making a donation. Every little bit helps. I personally don't need a salary, but the production and personnel costs for Undeceptions are pretty big. Well over $3,000 an episode nowadays. Go to underceptions.com, click the oversized donate button and see where the wind blows.
And while you're there, send us a question by audio or text and I'm going to try and answer it in an upcoming Q&A episode. Next episode, we're looking at animals, their suffering and their rights. See ya.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Triple First Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Editing by Richard Humwe. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out.
An Undeceptions Podcast.