Dear Reader,

I am pleased to be part of a panel with the Edinburgh International Centre for Spirituality and Peace. The EICSP was founded in December 2007 to provide educational opportunities and an international forum for understanding, experiencing, and participating in the rich diversity of the world’s spiritual traditions. I will be speaking about “The Shape of C.S. Lewis’s Spiritual Imagination” with an intriguing combination of folks from England and North America, including Simon Barrow (the Chair), Ron Wheeler (JohnsonU), Jim Beitler (the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton), Elizabeth Drummond Young (the Centre for Open Learning, U Edinburgh), and Andrew Lazo (Northwind Seminary).

You can register for the live event here (by donation). The forum is about an hour of the panelist talks and then a dialogue with the audience. I have included the bios below, and I encourage you to check out the EICSP’s work.

I have been relatively busy of late, so I will update my own part in this forum when I firm up the details. I spoke last night for the New Glasgow, PEI, Women’s Institute on the topic of “Lucy Maud Montgomery: Pulling Back the Veil” as part of a series they are having for their 100th anniversary. I am also prepping for a “Theology on Tap” public talk (in a pub) on C.S. Lewis and Octavia Butler on indigenous spaces. I am teaching two great new local courses in Applied Communications, Leadership, and Culture at UPEI–one on Digital Humanities and one on Podcasting. I’m supervising a J.R.R. Tolkien MA thesis and second reading a BA Honours one while working on a chapter on Tolkien’s networks for an upcoming volume. As part of our local interdisciplinary courses, I am pinch-hitting on some Japanese history lectures. We are working to establish the Curiosity and Inquiry Research and Communications Lab (CIRCL) at UPEI, and I have a related chapter on Religious Studies and Inquiry-based Learning in its last stages. And … conference season ahead. And … I eagerly await the next stage of edits for my book in press with Oxford UP. Lots on the go!

Other news and details to come.

Best to you all,
Brenton

Online Zoom Forum: C S Lewis: The Spiritual, Social, and Ethical Vision in his Life and Work.

Date: Wednesday 12 February 2025.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).

Description:

Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.

Chair:

Simon Barrow:

Bio: Simon Barrow is a writer, commentator, educator and researcher with wide experience in politics, public issues, media, organisational change, ethics and religion/beliefs. He was director of the think-tank Ekklesia from 2005-2024. His book Britain Needs Change: The Politics of Hope and Labour’s Challenge, co-edited with Gerry Hassan, was published by Biteback in November 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum, January 2025) and will be followed by Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story (Ekklesia Publishing, April 2025).

Speakers:

Prof Ron Wheeler:

Title: Reading The Screwtape Letters for Instruction in Practical Theology.

Description: In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis tackles some of the difficulties and distractions faced by the developing disciple of Jesus. To aid the transformation of Christ followers, Lewis addresses four questions: What is the nature of Reality? How do we develop as followers of Christ? What should we avoid as followers of Christ? What should we engage as followers of Christ?

Bio: Ronald E. Wheeler instructs students in composition and literature courses at Johnson University in Knoxville, Tennessee (fall 1977 to present). He also taught rhetorical studies for Tusculum College at the Knoxville campus (May 1995 through October 2006). He teaches an adult fellowship of readers at Woodlawn Christian Church. Ron and his wife, Martha, have two adult children, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Prof Jim Beitler:

Title: Reading as a Spiritual Practice: Lessons from C.S. Lewis’s Library.

Description: This talk explores what C.S. Lewis’s notes in his books have to teach us about reading as a spiritual and ethical practice.

Bio: Jim Beitler is the Director of the Marion E. Wade Center and a Professor of English at Wheaton College, where he holds the Marion E. Wade Chair of Christian Thought. His scholarship focuses on the rhetoric of Christian witness and writing as a spiritual activity, looking to C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Desmond Tutu, and other exemplary communicators as guides for faithful practice. Beitler is the author of three books—Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words (with Richard Hughes Gibson, 2020), Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church (2019), and Remaking Transitional Justice in the United States (2013)—and he teaches undergraduate courses on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien and Environmental Stewardship, and Christianity and Fantasy. He also serves as one of the hosts of the Wade Center Podcast.

Dr Elizabeth Drummond Young:

Title: Friendship and Faith.

Description: In this talk I look at CS Lewis’s assessment of friendship, and consider whether his views on this have any relationship with his personal faith journey from atheism to Christianity.

Bio: Elizabeth Drummond Young is a teaching fellow in philosophy at The University of Edinburgh (in the Centre for Open Learning). Her research interests include the contribution of women to philosophy in the 20th Century and the philosophy of religion. 

Dr Brenton Dickieson:

Bio: Besides teaching in the literature department at Signum University, Dr. Brenton Dickieson is Lecturer in Literature at The King’s College in New York City, Lecturer in Theology and Literature at Maritime Christian College in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Sessional Instructor in the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture at the University of Prince Edward Island, and Instructor in Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. He also does freelance speaking and writing and is the author of the popular Faith, Fiction, and Fantasy blog http://www.aPilgrimInNarnia.com.

After completing a Masters degree in biblical literature at Regent College, Brenton moved with his wife Kerry and his son Nicolas to their native home in Charlottetown, PEI to teach and write. His academic interests include how the creation of fictional universes helps in spiritual formation, theological exploration, and cultural criticism. He has recently completed a PhD at the University of Chester, focusing his work on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings.

The Rev Andrew Lazo:

Bio: The Rev. Andrew Lazo is an internationally-known speaker and writer specializing in C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. Andrew earned his Masters in Modern British Literature from Rice University where he was a Jacob K. Javits fellow in the Humanities. He is a frequent speaker around the U.S. and U.K. and has written several articles on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In 2009, Andrew published Mere Christians: Inspiring Encounters with C.S. Lewis. In 2014 he also was honored to transcribe, edit, and publish a previously unknown book by C.S. Lewis, “Early Prose Joy,” which was Lewis’s very first spiritual autobiography. For ten years he taught English and C. S. Lewis at St. Thomas and  Houston Christian High Schools. in Houston.

After finishing studies for an M. Div. (with Honors) at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, VA in May 2022, Andrew was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in January 2023 and serves as the Apprentice Rector at Church of the Messiah in Winter Garden, FL. He is also pursuing his doctorate in Romantic Theology at Northwind Seminary, where he serves as a Distinguished Lecturer. Andrew is married to author and speaker Dr Christin Ditchfield Lazo.

For more than fifteen years, Andrew has been working on a long-awaited study of Till We Have Faces, making groundbreaking discoveries all along the way. The results of his ongoing research have led him to give talks to the Mythopoeic Society in 2016 as Scholar Guest of Honor; in the summer of 2017, Andrew served as a plenary speaker at the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s 2017 Summer Institute in Oxford and Cambridge.