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The C.S. Lewis Summer Institute 2025

Returning Home

C.S. Lewis, Roots, & Transformation

We live in a time of many cultural challenges and truth claims. While this is, in a grand historical sense, nothing new, we also live in a time of unique challenges and opportunities for faith.

In 2025, the C.S. Lewis Summer Institute will look at faith through the metaphor of a journey, paying special attention to our contemporary world, to C.S. Lewis’s own journey, and to Biblical models.

We will explore ideas of roots, home, growth, travel, transformation, pilgrimage, and the hero’s quest. We will examine our individual and corporate journeys of faith amid the challenges of our contemporary world.

Some of the questions we will ask are:

How do our roots define us? How do they set us up for our journeys? As we grow in faith, what do we choose to root ourselves to?
What is our true home? How is it similar and different to our birth home and the homes we build as adults?
What does transformation look like? Individually? Culturally?
How are suffering and trauma overcome? How are they involved in growth and development?
How do we pursue being “transformed by the renewing of our minds”?
What does a Christian version of the “hero’s quest” look like?
How do goodness, truth, beauty, and friendship help us along the way?
What is the “pilgrim’s progress” in this life towards the Kingdom of Heaven, our “true home” that we shall return to one day?
How does individual transformation in Christ lead to Christians being “salt and light” to the culture around them? What is/are proper Christian responses to culture?