I wanted to share the news of this great line-up of Signum courses this coming January. I know and admire each of these preceptors, and had a little part to play in the background of the Inklings & Arthur and Le Guin courses. Or you can read Beowulf in Old English! It seems to me a brilliant way to spend the winter months.
The Signum University faculty is pleased to announce that Registration for the Spring 2027 Term is now open! Spring classes will begin the week of Monday, January 4, 2027. Graduate students and auditors can now register via Goldberry. Our Spring courses include:
Live Discussion by Gabriel Schenk Recorded Lectures by Gabriel Schenk & Maggie Parke This course includes two pre-recorded 90-minute lectures per week with one 60-minute discussion session as assigned.
Live Discussion & Recorded Lectures by Kristine Ainsworth Swank This course includes two live 90-minute lectures per week with one 60-minute discussion session as assigned.
Live Discussion by Paul Peterson (No Pre-Recorded Lectures) This course meets for two 90-minute preceptor-led discussion sessions each week (three hours total per week) Prerequisite: Introduction to Old English or a comparable.
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
I am super pleased to announce that my new book is in dock!
Well, I hope so, anyway. You can’t launch unless you are in harbour, after all, and I have had some trouble getting it distributed. As regular readers of A Pilgrim in Narnia know, the process of getting this book into harbour, so to speak, has been a bit rough. For example, I landed at a brilliant conference last week at George Fox University, and the friendly local bookseller couldn’t get it in. In the US, it is available at BAM and Amazon for $35 USD (list price), and it is overpriced at B&N. The hardback is available for £22.99 at Amazon UK, but it seems extremely expensive in Japan. In Australia, the Kindle is only $17.38, but the hardback is north of $65, meaning they are shipping from the US.
On Tuesday, Oct 6th at 7:00pm, we will finally launch The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis here in Charlottetown, PEI.
I have been looking forward to this book event for a while now. UPEI is my home, where I enjoy the support of dozens of colleagues. Some of them are literary folk, and it is fun to share that Spiritual Imagination has topped the new books list in categories like Literary Criticism and History, and in the UK it reached #2 in Literature. And a few of my fellow profs are experts in Religion–which is the shelf upon which my book sits at the Bookmark–so I’m pleased to say that Spiritual Imagination peaked at #2 on the Christian Literature and Art list, #5 on Christian Literature and Fiction, and in the top 10 in Theology.
I suspect, though, that other than some friendly faces from our hallowed halls, the bulk of people fit into two categories: C.S. Lewis readers and Narnia fans on the one hand; Christians, religious folk, and the spiritually curious on the other. As always, there will be a handful of folks who are writers by vocation–or at least have a manuscript or two in a desk drawer somewhere.
I’m a little nervous, admittedly, in my own harbour–even though the book has been keel-ready for years and in commission for months. They are my people, you know? Some of them saw me as a kid, blindly stumbling from plank to plank. Now, I am mature enough to stumble with eyes wide open, but I can’t “fake it ’til you make it’ with your own crew.
That said, I have a good friend, Dr. Kate Scarth, moderating the conversation. She is a UPEI professor and Chair of the L.M. Montgomery Studies, and the author of a new University of Toronto Press book, Romantic Suburbs: Imagining Home in Greater London. Would you agree with me that her book is in the running for best academic book cover of the year?
Kate is a smart reader and a bright literary light in our community, so she’ll see me safe from harbour. Because it is made of paper–and because I don’t really understand champagne–we won’t be breaking a bottle of bubbly on the book. However, we will chat about ideas, share some of the background story, and enjoy a reading or two.
And, of course, the book will be for sale!
So if you are nearby and want to take a little peek into the wardrobe, I hope you can stop by the Faculty Lounge on Tuesday (Main 201, not far from the University Ave. gates).
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
Hello kindred spirits, and welcome to the MaudCast, the podcast of the L.M. Montgomery Institute, broadcasting from the beautiful campus of the University of Prince Edward Island. And here we are with another great episode!
In S03E03, we’re chasing hidden links between two Canadian originals: our very own L.M. Montgomery and the painter and writer Emily Carr. Born on opposite coasts and just a few years apart—Carr in Victoria, BC, in 1871, Montgomery on Prince Edward Island, in 1874—both were shaped by an artistic vocation that captured them when they were little. With practiced skill and fierce ambition—and by decades of life writing that blurred the line between memoir and myth-making—they became the kind of Canadian icons to be memorialized by postage stamps, the Royal Canadian Mint, and—one of their nation’s highest pop culture honours—their own Heritage Minute minidocs.
One became the great visual storyteller of the Canadian landscape; the other became the voice of an island; and together, Islanders on the opposite ends of a newborn nation, they shaped the ways we define what it means to be Canadian.
Prompted by a couple of fascinating scholars—Bonnie Tulloch and Pascale Halliday—I wanted to know what happens when we read them side by side. Naturally, when all three of us were on campus, I invited them to sit down for a MaudCast chat, and I’d love to share it with you all now.
At the time we were all together in the MaudCast studio, Pascale was Executive Director of the Emily Carr House in Victoria, British Columbia. Perhaps feeling the call to the East that drew me back to the Island from BC lo and many years ago, Pascale has since moved to New Brunswick to become Visitor Program Manager at Kings Landing Historical Settlement, where she helps us to walk around for a bit in Canada’s past. As noted in the pod, Pascale hosted the Klondike Gold Rush history podcast with her father, worth checking out.
Bonnie Tulloch is a scholar and teacher who completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia shortly before we recorded our conversation. She is also one of the recipients of the Elizabeth Epperly Emerging Scholars award, the subject of season 1, episode 12 of the MaudCast—where, if I remember correctly, she flipped the studio and took control of the host microphone for a bit. I’d encourage you to check it out!
So settle in, and let’s spend some time popping in and out of the imaginative doors of two famous literary houses—Montgomery’s Green Gables and the Emily Carr House.
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
I love back-to-school week! A little while ago, I talked about the First Days of School in my Garden Gate Summer Note. A “Garden Gate Summer” is my own term for that blessed return of summer, even as the earth is tilting away from the sun. I love student nervousness and open questions, new clothes and pep rallies, varsity games and the inevitable staple of a new academic year: a bouncy castle (that’s one of my superstar past students cheering at centre in this archival photo, international dodgeball sensation Halen Skye).
We are certainly not experiencing anything like what old folks around here used to call an Indian Summer–though I am still holding on to hope and have bought tickets to an outdoor Twenty One Pilots concert on PEI’s North Shore tomorrow. I mean, one of my favourite bands in the world coming to the land of Anne? How could I miss it. They’ll be joined by Down With Webster, Kaleo, and a host of local bands. The Saturday night show closes with Sombr–a kind of newish emo vampire pop singing, heavy on the brooding–and, of all people, Natasha Beddingfield. I will prepare for four seasons of weather and try to keep up with my punk son and niblings. Here is a taste of 21 Pilots heading back to school:
It is all a bit ambitious. I’m absolutely wiped from all of the minute and major moments of connection in classrooms and on campus this week. My screen is increasingly filled with slides and spreadsheets. And I also have a weekend crowded with chances to talk about my new book, The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis.
Right now, I’m planning a discussion with the Harbor Online Community tonight at 7pm ET. My cousin, the newly doctored Rev. Dawn Dickieson, is one of the leaders of this innovative and inviting gathering of the curious and the faithful.
I met with one of the Harbor book clubs a couple of years ago to talk about The Screwtape Letters, and it was a highlight of the season for me. My sense is that not a few of the folks in that community have been hurt within the church or in the countless casualties of the current culture war, where spiritual life is challenged, coerced, merchandized, politicized, negated, or caricaturized.
My hope is that what I write about and talk about will help us see how C.S. Lewis–without ignoring his context or making him a plaster saint–helps us see further and imagine spiritual life in ways that are greater than we ever knew.
You can find the full Instagram post from @onlineharbor below. The Harbor website will get you connected if you would like to join in, or send me a note.
And, I have my first on-the-ground book launch! The generous folks at the Summerside Rotary Library are opening up a space for me to talk about The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis. I’m impressed to say that there will even be tidbits, refreshments as they call it. There’s more of a story about Summerside for me to tell sometime. For now, if you happen to be within striking distance of Summerside, PEI, we’d love to see you Sunday at 2pm.
Now, I’m back to editing video, answering advising emails, and thinking about the best way to set up tonight’s discussion. All the best to you, dear reader!
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
If you are not in North America, you may not know that there are some border tensions between the USA and its closest cultural cousin, Canada. Before last week, apparently, the wildfires that devastated our forests and consumed our towns have irresponsibly sent clouds of smoke to the south, without a permit. In the early ’80s, LA was the 4th largest Canadian city, and even still we play in your films and add our own jazz hands twist to your arts scene. And yet, a trade war. Even as our oil, potatoes, and scientists find their way into American cars, French fries, and research institutes, it seems that we Canadians have been unfair in our trading practices. It sounds odd, I know, but when it comes to kitchen tables and corners stores, the war is real.
Even for us here on the ground, it is a bit hard to believe. Camping this summer, I had Bostonians to the right of me and Texans to the left of me, and still all seemed okay. Accents differed, and tastes in music, but in each campsite the sparks went up to meet the arboreal atmosphere in much the same way. It is difficult to feel at war when tossing a soggy ball across the swimming pool while wearing bathing shorts. Our international brotherhood, it seems, was somewhat illicit. They apologized for all the things on the news, and I apologized for everything else (being Canadian). And then we seemed okay.
Somewhere in the midst, of all of this, my book has been lost. The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis, as an Oxford University Press book is, naturally, printed in the United States. Since our Aug 11th launch date, it has been available to Americans–and the Kindle is still on sale for $13.19 USD, and the list price is $35 USD (I have a 30% off promo code for the UK and US, so send me an email). In the US, my Kindle is still a “Top New Release” for 20th-century Literary Criticism–a category just ahead of the list on Tegestology through the Ages in popularity, but still kind of neat.
The book even has its first review!
Thanks to the clearly adept, intelligent, and book-chic “Sky-blue,” whoever you are–and kudos to your parents for giving you such a creative name.
Friends have sent me their box opening images and notes from upstate New York, Indianapolis, Indiana, Houston, Texas, Cambridge, Mass., London, England, and Iași, Poland. The word is out in the US and around the world.
But what about Flin Flon, Manitoba, Dildo, Newfoundland, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta, Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, Québec, or our own Crapaud, PEI?
In Canada, my home and native land, only the Kindle and Kobo have been available. It’s a puzzle–though academic libraries can access any chapter or the whole book (just ask). It was good fun in August to share my experience of unpacking my new book, The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis in a front-porch Instagram/Facebook video, but we still can’t get copies at our local bookstores.
Now, I’m not saying that my book has become a major pawn in the battle between the power brokers from the President’s White House and the advisors that gather at the Prime Minister’s favourite booth at Tim Hortons. I’m sure it is a coincidence….
In the meantime, though, I have good news! Books are starting to arrive at Canadian warehouses. I got an encouraging email today from New York that The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis is on the move. They will re-push the print copy to Amazon and Indigo, and, the Charlottetown Bookmark has been unwavering in its listing at $38.50 (which is less than Amazon). Another thanks to local booksellers–always check there first.
My next post will have news of a couple of local book launch events. I’ll be at the Undiscovered C.S. Lewis conference near Portland, OR Sep 23-27 as well.
Thanks, everyone, for hanging in there and sending the encouraging tweets, pics, and reviews.
What’s It All About?
With book sales exceeding 200 million copies, a billion-dollar film industry, and a bookshelf of critical, philosophical, and popular works, C.S. Lewis is at once the beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia and a leading twentieth-century English-speaking Christian public intellectual. Given the sheer diversity of Lewis’s writing, what holds all this together? What is the beating heart of Lewis’ work?
Among C.S. Lewis scholars, there is near-unanimous agreement with British philosopher Owen Barfield’s claim that, “what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.” In The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Brenton D. G. Dickieson argues that what Lewis reveals throughout his writings is a cross-shaped, or cruciform, spirituality. As an instinctive and integrative writer of spiritual theology, Lewis believed that “death is at the root of the whole matter”—that God’s self-surrender in Christ through death on a cross and subsequent resurrection is the normative pattern for a healthy spiritual life. This death-and-resurrection pattern unites Lewis’s Christian thought and produces a hopeful and evocative spirituality that is embedded in his poetry and prose.
By reconsidering him as a spiritual theologian, Dickieson uncovers a six-point “Logic of Cruciformity” in Lewis’s apologetics that is embedded in narrative form throughout his other works. The shape of the cross is the shape of Lewis’s spiritual theology. With the “upsidedownedness” of childlike wonder, Lewis reveals what Dickieson calls a “Theology of the Small,” filled with “sacred paradoxes” and offering a hopeful, transformative invitation to spiritual life.
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
