Senior Research Fellow, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford
“Space or Heaven? C.S. Lewis, Narnia, and the Planets”
Although C.S. Lewis is best known for his Chronicles of Narnia and various works of Christian apologetics (such as Mere Christianity and the Problem of Pain), he was professionally neither a writer of fiction nor a theologian. Lewis was a medieval scholar with a particular love for the pre-Copernican view of space as “the heavens.” In this lecture, Michael Ward shows how Lewis’s life-long immersion in medieval cosmology reveals the hidden inner meaning of the Narnia stories.
Ward is a senior research fellow in Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford. Though based at Blackfriars, he also has appointments at two U.S. universities: as a professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University in Texas and as a visiting professor at St. Katherine College in California. He is the author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (2010) and the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis ( 2010), and he presented the BBC television documentary, the Narnia Code (2009). As an Anglican clergyman, he served as chaplain of St. Peter’s College at the University of Oxford (2009–12) and as chaplain of Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge (2004–07). Ward was resident warden of C.S. Lewis’ Oxford home, The Kilns (1996–99). He studied English at Oxford, theology at Cambridge, and received a PhD in divinity from St. Andrews.
A light reception will follow the lecture and Q&A. RSVP by 5:00 p.m. on Monday, 3 June to Nellie Ashby at nellie.ashby@ byu.edu.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Europe and International Study Programs.