Since 1990, through five distinct phases, my research team has surveyed and assessed the values and worldviews of undergraduates around the world (but primarily in the United States). Each phase has keyed on a specific theme, including the self or personhood. The overall objective has been to determine the extent, character and implications of a "postmodern turn"--i.e., a worldview-shift away from both traditional and modern assumptions/values-among tertiary-levle students. Secondary questions explored...
C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, the major think tank of the intelligent design movement, aims to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies," and to "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God" (CSC 1999). Intelligent design advocates have sought to accomplish these goals by attempting to prove that modern evolutionary theory is wrong because it does not...
Beauty Will Save the World – But Which Beauty?
There are some quotations so arresting, so perfect in simplicity, that they never leave the memory. They are honeyed phrases for the mind: "Beauty will save the world," says a prince in Dostoevsky's unfortunately-titled The Idiot. The prince speaks as one having authority: beauty will save the world. Or there is Keats in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn": " ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty'-that is all / Ye know on earth, and all...
The Pursuit of Happiness: C. S. Lewis’s Eudaimonistic Understanding of Ethics
C. S. Lewis begins his sermon, "The Weight of Glory," with these justly-famous words: If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and...
The Enclosed Garden in C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia
A garden enclosed is my sister my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. -Canticles 4:12 I. Introduction To Christian writers, landscape and its seasons are not merely backdrops for plots and characters. As places of destination they are integral elements of quest narratives or pilgrimages. More importantly, nature's cyclical patterns often function as maps of the human soul: "o the Christian, the seasons' round, often represented by a contrast between spring...
Inspired by the life and legacy of C.S. Lewis, the C.S. Lewis Foundation is dedicated to advancing the renewal of Christian scholarship and artistic expression throughout the mainstream of our colleges and universities, and by extension, the culture at large.
In this spirit, the Foundation offers this online, peer-reviewed journal to stimulate discussion concerning the relationship of Christianity to the academy and the arts.
