Monthly Archives: June 2017

C.S. Lewis’ Amazing Connections with Canada: A Canada Day Friday Feature Visit to the Vault

Tomorrow is Canada Day here in the Great White North. Canada Day is, unsurprisingly, celebrated in Canada, and by the millions of Canadians hidden secretly among the peoples of the world, waiting until the signal to rise up and overthrow … Continue reading

Posted in Lewis Biography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

When Sam Gamgee Wrote to J.R.R. Tolkien

As far as I know, no one named Puddleglum or any Pevensie has ever written to C.S. Lewis. Has anyone named Ged or Arha ever written to Ursula K. Le Guin, if there is anyone with those names? Among the various Potter … Continue reading

Posted in Reflections | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

The House that Sharpe Built: “The Slip” by Mark Sampson

In some ways, it is all the fault of a lapel pin. That’s when it all began to fall apart for Dr. Philip Sharpe, Professor of philosophy at Canada’s most prestigious university and the author of a number of hit … Continue reading

Posted in Reflections | 5 Comments

Between Mars and Malacandra, Fantasy and Real Life (A Friday Feature Visit to the Vault)

This is a post from 5 years ago that I still quite like. What interested Lewis about planets as a literary backdrop was not their physical properties but their mythical properties—both how they worked in classical and medieval mythology, and how … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Friday, Thoughtful Essays | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

On Food Insecurity, Systems Mapping, Beren and Lúthien, and Other Obviously Connected Things (An Update)

I have had one of those unusual weeks where my research with the government of Prince Edward Island has taken over. I have been in Lean Six Sigma training, which is a fairly heavy duty process management system. Our team … Continue reading

Posted in Reflections | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Please Vote: “The Outlaw In My Lineage” by Nicolas Dickieson

The other day I took my family for a walk around my land. It is just a handful of acres now, a field farmed for soybean or alfalfa. It once was part of a much larger 100-acre plot that was the … Continue reading

Posted in Reflections | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

20 Years to 8 Children in Narnia with Author Jared Lobdell

I encountered Jared Lobdell’s work because he was one of the few critics to make C.S. Lewis’ WWII-era science fiction–what I call the Ransom Cycle–a study of its own. His 2004 book,  The Scientifiction Novels of C.S. Lewis: Space and … Continue reading

Posted in Fictional Worlds, Guest Blogs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

2017 Mythopoeic Awards Finalists and A Review of “The Chapel of the Thorn” by Charles Williams

The Mythopoeic Award shortlist is out (see here). I’m not often at the same table as the cool kids on the newest and hottest fantasy lit–I’m just now reading Patrick Rothfuss, and wondering what I have done with my life … Continue reading

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

The Deeper Meaning of “The Great Divorce” (Feature Friday)

It’s difficult to know why, but this post has remained among the most popular for the last few months. For the past few years I have been trying to encourage a recovery of The Great Divorce. It is a great work, … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Friday, Original Research | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 39 Comments

Five Words We Should Banish from our Vocabulary, Or Preventing Verbicide with C.S. Lewis

As a voracious reader and great lover of language, C.S. Lewis was concerned about “verbicide,” what he called the “murder of words.” As Lewis describes in Studies in Words (7-8), verbicide happens in a number of ways: Inflation of a Word’s Value: “Inflation is … Continue reading

Posted in Thoughtful Essays | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 61 Comments