English Language and Literature Commons^™

Louis Markos, Passing The Torch: An Apology For Classical Christian Education, Joshua Herring

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Louis Markos, Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education (Lisle, IL: IVP, 2025). 240 pages. $30.00. ISBN 9781514011300.

Simon Horobin, C. S. Lewis’S Oxford, William Gentrup

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Simon Horobin, C. S. Lewis’s Oxford (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024). 196 pages. $39.12. ISBN 9781851245642.

John Hendrix, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship Of C. S. Lewis And J. R. R. Tolkien, John Stanifer

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of John Hendrix, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (New York: Abrams Fanfare, 2024). 218 pages, including index. $24.99. ISBN 9781419746345.

Norbert Feinendegen - C. S. Lewis: Űberrascht Von Gott: Wie Der Groβe Christliche Denker Zum Glauben Fand, Monika B. Hilder

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Norbert Feinendegen, C. S. Lewis: Űberrascht von Gott: Wie der groβe christliche Denker zum Glauben fand (Basel: Fontis-Verlag, 2023). 304 pages. $25.00. ISBN 9783038482567.

Leslie Baynes, Between Interpretation And Imagination: C. S. Lewis And The Bible, Donald T. Williams

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Leslie Baynes, Between Interpretation and Imagination: C. S. Lewis and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2025). viii + 343 pages. $38.99. ISBN 9780802874009.

Aaron Bair, A Joyful Outpost: Exploring The Household Economy Of The Beavers From The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Annie Crawford

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Aaron Bair, A Joyful Outpost: Exploring the Household Economy of the Beavers from The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe (Independently published, 2023). 125 pages. $12.99. ISBN 9798869938367.

David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas And Jerry L. Walls, Eds., C. S. Lewis As Philosopher: Truth, Goodness And Beauty, 3rd Ed., Norbert Feinendegen

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas and Jerry L. Walls, eds. C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, 3rd ed. (Houston, TX: High Bridge Books, 2024). 543 pages. $25.99. ISBN 9781962802116.

As I Was Saying, As I Have Said,, Scott Cairns

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

severest pain will drop you to the floor; and its descent may draw you farther yet, where it reveals a neat, new aperture your pain just now has opened in your head.

Stage Iv Intercession Prayer To Mary, Mother Of God, Elisa A. Garza

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

May your example inspire me as I long for a fearless future.

On The Importance Of Sacred Art, Elisa A. Garza

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

The stately Madonna of Romano’s painting seems out of character for Our Lady but no more unusual than a calm lamb resting under her firm hand, or colonnade that suggests she sits in the Vatican garden.

Beatitudes For This World, Elisa A. Garza

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Blessed are those who unfairly labor; they shall allocate the fruits.

The Corinthian Twins: The Mystery Behind Naming King Lune’S Sons, Jono Darville

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Michael Ward’s landmark discovery, as outlined in Planet Narnia, unlocked the hidden structure of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Ward persuasively demonstrated that Lewis used the seven planets of medieval cosmology as an organizing principle for the Narnia series. With his discovery firmly in place, Ward has encouraged others to investigate the Narniad for new planetary connections and influences. To that end, in this article, I argue that C.S. Lewis named Cor and Corin after the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians in The Horse and His Boy, as these names are a perfect fit …

Sin, Grace, And Conversion In C. S. Lewis’S The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Christopher Varga

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Was C. S. Lewis Pelagian? While his apologetic works make skillful use of the concept of free will, some worry that he takes the emphasis on free will too far, allowing no room for God's gracious intervention in works such as The Great Divorce and The Problem of Pain. This essay seeks to challenge a Pelagian characterization of Lewis. It argues that there is in Lewis’s theology a dialectic in which the burden for damnation rests solely with the sinner’s own free choice, and yet where God is solely to praise for actively rescuing the saved, resembling a single …

What Does Nature Mean In The Abolition Of Man? Or, The Participatory Ontology Behind The Sublime Waterfall, Chris R. Armstrong

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

If Lewis’s Abolition of Man is simply an argument for objective moral value, or what we have called “the natural law,” then why begin with waterfalls that demand of us certain kinds of aesthetic judgment,[1] and end by saying that technocrats who take Nature in their own hands to control others with it have stepped outside of something larger than moral law, viz. the Tao, the Real itself, and thereby lost their very humanity?[2]

What, that is, is Nature in the Abolition? Certainly, it is not nature as construed in philosophical naturalism after Jane Austen, after the advent …

Teaching The Abolition Of Man, Joel Heck, Robert Koons, Josiah Peterson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

The authors also hope that this article will help readers better understand The Abolition of Man and raise the level of interest in teaching this important book in schools, churches, and in many other venues and that many will find here helpful practical ideas for such teaching.

Discovering C. S. Lewis’S Argument From Awe Against Philosophical Naturalism, Piotr Bylica

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Although Clive Staples Lewis’s (1898–1963) works on the intersection of philosophy and religion were aimed at a broader readership and are indeed well-known among the general public, they are also valued among professional philosophers and theologians alike, especially those focusing on the relations between theism, atheism, and naturalism. His three most popular arguments against naturalism are the Argument from Reason, the Moral Argument, and the Argument from Desire. In that context, the present article aims to show that Lewis actually made use of a fourth type of argument against philosophical naturalism that has so far escaped identification. Since this argument …

C. S. Lewis And The Argument From Reason, Elijah Mcclanahan

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

This essay surveys and demonstrates that the "argument from reason" is a dominant methodological theme in the apologetics of C. S. Lewis.

C. S. Lewis And Artificial Intelligence: An Ai Ethics Problem, Justin E. Edgerly

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

This paper demonstrates that the quest for safe and ethical AI is undermined by much of the philosophy, implicit and explicit, in AI literature and undergirding AI research and development. C. S. Lewis’s writings provide a prescient and penetrating critique of this philosophy and point toward a “regenerate science” that addresses the present need for wisdom in AI development. This paper contributes to the field of AI ethics by presenting several Lewisian concerns about the nature, application, and undergirding philosophy of current and future AI technologies, as well as a Lewisian perspective on the requirements for safe and ethical AI.

Divergent Paths: The Spiritual Friendship Of C. S. Lewis And Dom Bede Griffiths, Martha Abele Mac Iver

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

This essay argues that despite their parallel conversion journeys at Oxford and their lifelong friendship, C. S. Lewis and Dom Bede Griffiths ultimately came to different understandings about the relationship between humans and God and what it means to commune with God in what we commonly call prayer. Despite the frequent mention of prayer in their letters, their views of the way in which God was present within them and what communion with God entailed diverged in significant ways as Griffiths sought to integrate Christian and Hindu conceptions of God. Their own spiritual friendship may have survived this rift, but …

C. S. Lewis’S Lost French Doctorate, Anne-Frédérique Mochel-Caballero

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Before the American Narnia films, C. S. Lewis was virtually unknown in France. Even today, his fame is nowhere near the level it has reached in the English-speaking world, be it in academia, among Christians, or in popular culture. The number of French doctoral theses or books on Lewis is extremely small. As for the French translations of his books, many of them are now out of print. However, this was not always the case. Lewis has never been as well-known in France as in Britain or America, but during his lifetime he achieved a certain fame in secular universities, …

Re-Dating An Inklings Photograph, Harry Lee Poe

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Perhaps the most delightful and helpful introductory biography of C. S. Lewis is Walter Hooper’s Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography. Published in 1982, it was the first book I reviewed for an academic journal as a freshly minted PhD graduate. The lavish presence of photographs takes the reader into the world of Lewis from his earliest childhood until his death in 1963. Hooper probably knew more about Lewis and his works than any other person, but even Hooper had to make educated guesses from time to time, which very rarely proved wrong.

Dating The Undated Poems In Don King’S Collected Poems Of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition, Charlie W. Starr

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Don W. King made a monumental contribution to Lewis studies when he released his Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition. Prior to this volume, Lewis’s poetry was scattered among at least four books and much remained unpublished. King gathered all of Lewis’s poetry, apart from a few poetic fragments, into a single volume. Since the book’s publication in 2015, a handful of additional Lewis poems have been discovered. Nevertheless, the fact that the vast majority of Lewis’s poetry now exists in a single volume remains a huge step forward in Lewis scholarship and our ability to appreciate …

“Frankenstein’S Nursery Rhymes” And Other Unpublished Poems By Joy Davidman, Don W. King

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

In 2015 I edited and published A Naked Tree: Joy Davidman’s Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis and Other Poems. I avoided referring to this volume as the collected poems of Davidman since I decided to withhold publication of twenty-nine poems, primarily because I wanted the attention of readers to focus upon Davidman’s forty-five sonnets to Lewis as well as the poems comprising Letter to a Comrade, the only collection of her verse published during her lifetime. However, I now think it is time to bring these unpublished poems to print. With a few exceptions, I have arranged the poems …

Frontmatter (Volume 19 Issue 1), Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

No abstract provided.

A Tiny Battle: Conflict, Structure, And Satire In "The Rape Of The Lock", Helen R. Ball

The Confluence

Writing in London during the eighteenth-century, the poet Alexander Pope earned an enduring reputation in literary canon as a master of satire. His well-loved poem The Rape of the Lock exemplifies his biting wit and characteristically satirical heroic rhyme couplets. In my article, I use a formalist literary approach to examine Pope's stylistic, literary, and rhetorical strategies throughout the climactic third canto of the poem. Performing a close reading, this essay analyzes the intricacies of the poem through its use of diction, rhyme, and dramatic subject matter, ultimately arguing that Pope achieves a complex balance of satirizing and sympathizing with …

“But I’M Glad I’M Not A Hog!”: The Pig, The Laborer & “Humanity” In Animal Farm (1945) & The Jungle (1905), Madelyn Bell

English Honors Papers

This thesis places The Jungle and Animal Farm in conversation with one another to examine how each text engages, reframes, and complicates Marxist conceptions of labor, class, and (de)individuality through the figure of the pig. Beginning from the pig’s marked similarity to humans – its intelligence, sociality, and symbolic proximity – the analysis considers how this likeness makes the pig a particularly charged symbol for negotiating the moral and conceptual boundary between human and animal, inviting a reading in which human structures are reflected back through the animal form. Attending each novel’s distinct concern with socialism – Sinclair’s investment in …

"For What Do You Hunger?": Metaphors Of Consumption And The Gothic Female Experience, Olivia G. Wychock

Master’s Theses

“For what do you hunger?”: Metaphors of Consumption and the Gothic Female Experience offers a feminist-forward analysis on the female experience in Gothic literature, specifically through the lens of metaphors of consumption. This thesis examines how, from the Gothic’s inception, women have been the victims of sexual violence and misconduct, rendering them disposable by patriarchal agents. As the Gothic begins to change over the course of the nineteenth century, female protagonists gain agency and move from being completely victimized to playing the villain and, eventually in post-nineteenth-century Gothic, becoming the victor. That is to say that the Gothic both reinforces …

What To Do With An Improper Woman: Gender Roles And Their Repercussions In Great Expectations, Abby Shaver

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

"Sing It Again": Linguistic Medievalisms In Geoffrey Hill And Seamus Heaney, Christian Cotten-Dixon

Honors College Theses

This study examines the use of early medieval structure and language in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, focusing on their near-contemporary collections, North and Mercian Hymns. Both collections use etymological and poetic structures to fashion an imagined medieval past in order to discuss personal and cultural narratives of history. Leveraging these structures in poetry and digging them out of past strata like a material artifact, Heaney and Hill collapse linear systems of time and language and access past word forms even as they evolve. This archaeological approach to poetry gives them the means to place the …

Awakening The Mind: How Secure Attachment Impacts Language Acquisition In Charles Dickens's Literary Orphans, Alaina Gray

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

As a young child, Charles Dickens attached securely to his family. Through his strong literary relationship with his mother, Dickens learned to read well yet experienced a period of parental separation during his blacking factory employment, providing many opportunities to meet and interact with abandoned children, who pervade his novels. Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs describe the negative impacts of orphanhood in Dickens: The Orphan Condition. While Hochman and Wachs address the social and economic difficulties faced by Dickens’s literary orphans, they did not connect the orphan condition to impaired cognitive development. Experiencing an excellent literary relationship with his mother, …