Will Vaus

Book signings are always fun events for a writer, at least for a writer who is as new to the profession as I am. Such events are enjoyable for the obvious reason that they are flattering to the ego but also for some less obvious reasons.* I enjoy the people I get to meet, like those I met this week at a book signing in my home town of Monterey, Virginia. Who said a prophet hath no honor in his home town? I felt very honored indeed. I had the privilege of meeting a woman who was both a lawyer and a theologian--following in the great tradition of John Calvin, no doubt. There was also another person present at the signing who began reading C. S. Lewis in the 1940's. There were others who shared my interest in travel and the desire to get to know the life setting (the sitz-em-leben) behind the works of a beloved author; in fact, one other person present at the signing had been to Oxford and seen the grounds of The Kilns, Lewis's home. All that to say, if you invite me to...

I know, I know, I've been a bad blogger lately. Actually, I've been a non-existent blogger. One of the reasons is because I have been working on editing my new book. To read more about that click on the My Father Was a Gangster link to the right. So, I'm sorry for leaving all of you, my friends in blogland, high and dry. Forgive me. I will try to do better in the future. Also, last Sunday I had tea with C. S. Lewis . . . sort of. Actually what my wife and I did was to invite the Harrisonburg C. S. Lewis Society over to our house for an English Tea and a viewing of the documentary-- C. S. Lewis: Dreamer of Narnia . We feasted on scones, hot out of the oven, the only way to eat scones. We munched on cucumber sandwiches, of course; how can one have an English tea without cucumber sandwiches? We also delighted in delectable Eton Mess. What is Eton Mess you ask? It is the dessert traditionally served for Parent's Day at Eton College, every June 4, I believe. ...

There was a fine newspaper article today in the Daily News Record of Harrisonburg, Virginia about our Harrisonburg C. S. Lewis Society. Ray Schneider, pictured above, was one of the members of our group interviewed by Luanne Austin of the Record. To read the article click here: Daily News Record . To learn more about our C. S. Lewis Society click here: C. S. Lewis Society .

As a follow-up to my last blog about the C. S. Lewis Trail I thought some of you, who might consider a trip to Belfast, would like to see some more photos of the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn, County Down. C. S. Lewis once said that his vision of heaven was of Oxford picked up and set down in the middle of County Down, so that should give you an idea of how beautiful the countryside is. I think I would have to agree with CSL. The Old Inn is the place where Lewis took his wife Joy on their honeymoon and it is set in a lovely part of the county. To my mind, Ulster (Northern Ireland as a whole) is the best kept secret in Ireland, at least among Americans. During our visits there we were struck by how few Americans we met along the way. Many from Europe have discovered the beauties of Northern Ireland, but I think many Americans are put off by memories of "The Troubles" in the news. Our experience in touring Northern Ireland was that it was a peaceful and breathtakingly gorgeou...

The C. S. Lewis Trail is a path around the environs of East Belfast, and beyond that to Crawfordsburn, which takes the walker and/or driver around the major sites associated with C. S. Lewis in Northern Ireland. Maps of the C. S. Lewis Trail may be obtained from St. Mark's Church, Dundela. Click here for more info: C. S. Lewis & St. Mark's Church . I have been "on the trail" on three occasions: by myself in 2002, with my wife in 2003, and with my children in 2004. The photos above are from my visit in 2002. Clockwise from top left are photos of: The Old Inn, Crawfordsburn; the blue plaque at Lewis's birthplace, a view of Belfast, the childhood home of Arthur Greeves (no longer standing), Campbell College (the boys' school Lewis attended for a brief time, the C. S. Lewis sculpture by Ross Wilson in Strandtown, the sign near Dundela Flats (where Lewis was born). My wife and I especially enjoyed our stay at the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn, where Lewis of...

Great news! I just read today that a company has purchased the rights to develop A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken into a film, and someone is beginning to work on a script for the movie. To read more about it click here: A Severe Mercy . A Severe Mercy is one of my favorite books of all time. I was blessed to correspond with Sheldon Vanauken and meet him twice during the last year of his life. To learn more about him and the book click here: www.willvaus.com/sheldon_vanauken .

In 1997 my wife and I led a C. S. Lewis Tour to England. George Sayer, C. S. Lewis's former student, friend and biographer, helped us plan what we would do for our visit to Great Malvern, the English country town where Lewis attended preparatory school between the ages of 12 and 15. Sayer told us just what we should see and even where we could go on one of Lewis's favorite walks. To top it all off, Mr. Sayer met with our group and gave us a delightful lecture on Lewis and his work, followed by a tour of Malvern College, where Lewis had been a student and Sayer himself taught English, in more recent years. To my great joy I discovered today that Dick Staub posted an interview with George Sayer on The Kindlings web site. I listened to the first part of the interview earlier today and felt like I just had a visit again with Mr. Sayer. My one regret about that visit to Great Malvern was that we had so little time together. I told Mr. Sayer that I wished we could spend a lot more...

Above is my scrapbook page of St. Mark's, Dundela, Belfast, the church where C. S. Lewis was baptized and in which he had his early training in the faith. (The picture below shows the baptismal font in the center.) Lewis's maternal grandfather was the first rector of St. Mark's, and thus Lewis's mother, Flora, grew up in the Rectory (above left). Lewis could see the tower of St. Mark's (above right) from the third floor window of Little Lea, the window at the opposite end of the house from the Little End Room. Lewis wrote the following about his early church experience in Surprised by Joy : "If aesthetic experiences were rare, religious experiences did not occur at all. Some people have got the impression from my books that I was brought up in strict and vivid Puritanism, but this is quite untrue. I was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church. I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannot remember feeling mu...

One of the greatest joys of my life has been touring C. S. Lewis's Ireland and England, so I thought I would share a bit of that tour with you here in this blog, starting with Lewis's childhood home, Little Lea, on the outskirts of Belfast. Lewis writes of that home in Surprised by Joy : "In 1905, my seventh year, the first great change in my life took place. We moved house. My father, growing, I suppose in prosperity, decided to leave the semi-detachd villa in which I had been born and build himself a much larger house, further out in what was then the country. The 'New House', as we continued for years to call it, was a large one even by my present standards; to a child it seemed less like a house than a city." The key phrase in that last paragraph is: "to a child". What Lewis tells us in Surprised by Joy is told from a child's perspective. The house is large, but not so large as Lewis makes it sound. But to a child it would have been h...

Volume 2 of C. S. Lewis: Life, Works & Legacy focuses on Lewis's work as fantasist, mythmaker and poet. It contains thirteen chapters with essays by various Lewis scholars on subjects ranging from Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy to Narnia, and Till We Have Faces to Screwtape. One feature of this volume I especially appreciate are the essays by Don King on Lewis's poetry. King is undoubtedly the world expert on this aspect of Lewis's work. I found King's third essay on what he calls Lewis's "topical" poems quite helpful. Rather than surveying Lewis's post-conversion poetry in chronological order, King leads us through, what I consider to be the best of Lewis's poetry, in a topical manner. King concludes with an evaluation of Lewis's explicitly religious poetry. King calls this "perhaps the finest body of poetry he [Lewis] produced." I would have to agree with King's assessment. Of these religious poems one of my favorites is Th...

Volume 4 of C. S. Lewis: Life, Works & Legacy focuses on Lewis as "Scholar, Teacher & Public Intellectual". One of the most helpful essays in this volume for people wanting to learn more about Lewis and his work is entitled C. S. Lewis Scholarship: A Bibliographical Overview by Diana Pavlac Glyer and David Bratman. This essay is an excellent, up-to-date survey of secondary Lewis literature. Of course one of the reasons why I like this essay is because Glyer and Bratman have such nice things to say about my book, Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis ! Glyer and Bratman write: "In general, the best books on Lewis's theology do not attempt to argue his point; they explain his views or place them in a wider context. "The finest of these books is Mere Theology by Will Vaus, which offers a systematic catalog of Lewis's religious thought on a wide variety of subjects: scripture, the trinity, the fall, the Holy Spirit, the church,...

Here is that wonderful photo of C. S. Lewis which I mentioned in yesterday's blog--a photo I have never seen before. It is on the cover of Volume III of C. S. Lewis: Life, Works & Legacy , edited by Bruce Edwards. The third volume in this stupendous series of scholarly essays treats Lewis as apologist (defender of the faith), philosopher and theologian. I have only had time to take a quick dip into this volume, but what immediately attracted my eye was the chapter on The Sermons of C. S. Lewis: The Oxford Don as Preacher by Greg Anderson. Preaching is a much neglected aspect of Lewis's work, and so I look forward to learning more from Anderson's article. As Anderson points out in the essay, Lewis was not known for being a biblical expositor. In his sermons he never takes just one text to flesh it out for his hearers. But one wonders: "Is biblical exposition the only way to preach biblically?" After all, Jesus himself seldom if ever exposited a text o...

My copy of the four volume series, C. S. Lewis: Life, Works & Legacy , edited by Bruce L. Edwards, arrived today. And what a handsome set of hardback books it is! As a true bibliophile I love not only the content of my favorite books, but also the way they look on the shelf, the way they feel, the way they smell. This beautiful collection is a delight on all counts. One added bonus is that the photo on the cover of volume 3 is a photo of C. S. Lewis which I have never seen before. I will have to share that in a future blog. For now I say bravo to Bruce Edwards and to all the contributors. I can't wait to dive in and wade through all the contents. I imagine it will be as much of a delight reading all the essays as it was writing the four biographical essays which I was honored to contribute to the first volume. If you want to enjoy these books for yourself and can't afford the $300 price tag, let me encourage you to urge your local library to purchase this true encyclo...

On 2 May 1935 C. S. Lewis made the following statement in a letter to The Times Literary Supplement regarding the determination of the most accurate text of Shakespeare's plays: "We cannot even say that those changes which Shakespeare agreed to reluctantly (supposing we can identify them) are corruptions: no man, perhaps, ever finishes a work of art without omitting much that he would gladly have retained, nor does the knife always hurt less in the author's own hand than in another's." ( Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis , Volume III, p. 1529) That, to me, is a fascinating statement about one writer from the pen of another writer. And I feel the truth of that statement very keenly right now as I am working on editing my second book. There is much that I will have to omit which I would have gladly retained, and wielding the knife myself hurts no less than having it wielded by my publisher! For more on my next book you may visit my other blog at: http://wi...

Having lost my own father through death ten years ago, I found very touching the following letter from C. S. Lewis written just after his father's death. The letter is written to the nurse who cared for Lewis's dying mother twenty-one years before. This wonderful lady apparently wrote a note of sympathy to C. S. Lewis upon the death of his father. . . . Magdalen College, Oxford Sept. 29th 1929 My dear Nurse Davison, Excuse me. I cannot address you by any other name. Remember you? I should think I do. Do you remember the night Warnie and I came home very late and got into trouble and were sent to bed without supper, and you brought us in bread and jam in our little room -- opposite my father's bedroom? Do you remember the night you went to the Mikado with Warnie and I wasn't allowed to go? Do you remember the first night before my poor mother's operation when you both sat and talked about operations and I said 'Well you are gloomy people.' And now it has...

That's probably the question a number of you have been asking since I haven't posted anything for almost two weeks! The short answer is that I have been working on a new book, soon to be published by Believe Books ( http://www.believebooks.com ). You can visit my new blog to learn about it: http://willvaus2.blogspot.com .

Andrew Adamson has launched a video blog about the production of the second Chronicles of Narnia movie. Check it out!

"On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, 'Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!'" Luke 24:1-6 "It is very important to be clear about what these people meant. When modern writers talk of the Resurrection they usually mean one particular moment--the discovery of the Empty Tomb and the appearance of Jesus a few yards away from it. The story of that moment is what Christian apologists now chiefly try to support and sceptics chiefly try to impugn. But this almost exclusive concentration on the first five minutes or so of th...

"For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison . . ." 1 Peter 3:18-19 "'Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend--a man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathise with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.' "'And will He ever do so again?' "'It was not once long ago that He did it. Time does not work that way when once ye have left the Earth. All moments that have been or shall be were, or are, present in the moment of His descending. There is no spirit in prison to Whom He did not preach.' "'And some hear him?' "'Aye.'" C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce , London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945, p. 114. Prayer: Dear Jesus, thank yo...

"It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, 'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.' When he had said this, he breathed his last." Luke 23:44-46 "God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing--or should we say 'seeing'? there are no tenses in God--the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a 'host' who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may expl...