Where friendships deepen and ideas come alive
To help us plan effectively, we ask that you register for the one seminar you wish to attend. Those attending the full conference will receive an email on June 11, 2025 with a link to register for their choice of afternoon seminar.
On three afternoons during the conference, participants join small-group seminars led by scholars, artists, and thinkers across a range of disciplines. These sessions offer a space for deeper discussion, hands-on learning, and shared discovery in the spirit of C.S. Lewis’s intellectual curiosity.
The afternoon seminars are mini-courses that take place in three parts, over three days of the event. Attendees will chose one seminar that they will attend on all three days, with the same group of fellow attendees.
Note that those participating in the Academic Roundtable are automatically signed up for all three days of the Roundtable sessions and do not select a choice of seminars.
Please browse all of our Seminar Leaders and their topics below to get a better idea of what’s being offered.
(Listed in alphabetical order by last name)
C.S. Lewis once asserted: “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him [George MacDonald] as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasize it.”
Many Lewis scholars continue to trivialize Lewis’ repeated recommendations to spend considered time in the works of MacDonald, of whom he wrote: “to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.” For some it is because they were stymied when they picked up Phantastes, and then never got further. But Lewis spent time with the full variety of MacDonald’s corpus: essays, sermons, novels, short stories…he even read MacDonald’s epic poem Diary of an Old Soul as a nightly devotion. Shared appreciation of MacDonald’s writings was a touchpoint with friends – such as Tolkien, Barfield, Greaves, Warnie, Joy – and even in the last year of his life Lewis was publicizing MacDonald’s influence upon him.
In this seminar we will overview MacDonald’s biography, dive into some of the works that Lewis loved best, have fun finding resonances and borrowings, and discuss why Lewis and others find MacDonald’s writings transformative.
In his letters, C.S. Lewis often refers to his last novel, Till We Have Faces, as “my best book.” But why? For the last twenty years, Andrew Lazo has been digging deeply into this “Myth Retold,” and he is currently writing a definitive study of the novel. Andrew’s research not only supports and explains Lewis’s claim for this book as his “best,” it opens the way to understanding what has remained in some ways deeply puzzling to readers for decades.
In three highly-interactive sessions (all questions delightedly welcomed), Andrew will show how Till We Have Faces contains themes and references from all his other work, how it helps us see Lewis’s main theme more clearly, and how in Orual’s account of spiritual searching we find our own stories of God’s love in our lives.
Journey through the seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia and discover how each adventure can serve as inspiration for our own spiritual transformation. From Lucy’s first steps through the wardrobe to the final scenes in which the Friends of Narnia enter Aslan’s Country, we’ll explore how Lewis’s stories illuminate different steps and stages of spiritual growth — from initial awakening to redemption to costly discipleship, and finally, the ultimate returning home.
This interactive seminar explores the recurring theme of spiritual journey woven throughout Lewis’s beloved series and reveals how these fabulous adventures mirror the patterns of our own faith development. Through guided reflection and discussion, participants will go “further up and further in” — identifying their current spiritual seasons, recognizing pivotal moments in their personal stories, and gaining fresh perspectives on their own roots and transformation.
C.S. Lewis’s inability to participate in team sports, J. R. R. Tolkien’s familial losses in childhood, Susanna Clarke’s chronic illness: the lives of many beloved authors have been marked by distinct limitations. Often the connection between limitations and legacies in others’ lives seems clear to us, but what about in our own? What might happen when we explore the idea that limitations can serve as provisional boundaries for the work God has for us to do?
This seminar will weave stories of authors and poets with guided time to examine where the lines have fallen in our lives. We will make space for unhurried reflection and companionable discussion to not only acknowledge our limitations, but consider what advantages those limitations might already be giving us for the work we are called to do creatively—whether through art, hobbies, or the everyday tasks of our lives. What clues, insights, and encouragement can be gathered from the shape of the canvas God has given each one of us?
Session 1: Close and Slow: how poetry finds roots in us and for us
This opening seminar will look at the ‘close and slow’ nature of poetry, and the ways in which its countercultural emphasis on taking our time and waiting on meaning can endow our lives with rootedness and depth. Using some interactive examples alongside reflections on the nature of poetic work, attendees will be encouraged to think about ways in which poetry can counter our sense of dislocation and exile as modern people.
Session 2: Seamus Heaney: ‘When my roots were crossed with my reading’
Rootedness is at the heart of Seamus Heaney, as a man and as a poet. In this session, we will consider how home and belonging oriented Heaney’s vision of the world, and how that sense of connection works in our lives as we encounter and enjoy his poetry.
Session 3: Louis MacNeice: ‘Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new’
Louis MacNeice was a poet who lived between significant spaces (Ireland and England) and times (peace and war). Born in Belfast nine years after C.S. Lewis and dying two months before him, MacNeice is a case study in the search for belonging and rootedness in the wake of trauma and displacement. This seminar will examine these themes, alongside the Belfast that MacNeice and Lewis shared, and will connect with our own experiences of dislocation and upheaval.
It is a universal mark of being human that we need, desire, hunger, and ache for things we do not have. We are creatures of longing from our first breath to our last. Some longing is as simple as basic hunger, some as complex as longing for a specific someone to love; and some longing is infinitely more nuanced. But all longing leads. The question is to where or to whom? What does longing tell us about the nature of God and His plans for us?
“The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing … that is our life, to be trained by longing.” ― Saint Augustine
C.S. Lewis was never shy to talk about longing. In his chapter titled, “Hope” in Mere Christianity, he says there are three ways of dealing with longing – two that are wrong and one that is right: The Fools’ Way, The Disillusioned Way, and the Christian Way. In these seminar sessions we will look at these three ways, discuss how to discern and identify them in ourselves, and consider how to honour our holy longing for what it tells us about our identity, our calling, and the promise carried in it.
Recommended reading beforehand:
“Who can you call at 2am when everything has gone wrong?”
That was the question that jolted Sheridan Voysey out of his own friendship complacency in 2008. Little did he know it would become the catalyst for him launching the first organisation dedicated to adult friendship—Friendship Lab. With 1-in-5 of us lacking close friends and loneliness skyrocketing across the world, it’s time to get intentional about this foundational bond.
In this three-part seminar series, Sheridan will weave scripture, social science, art, film clips, guided discussion, and reflective exercises together to help us rediscover what friendship is, what it’s not, how it’s formed, and the nutrients needed to make it flourish. Expect to come away with new names on your heart and clarity on how to bring your nascent and latent relationships another step closer.
To be a friend is a sacred calling, to have a friend is a sacred trust. Together, let’s pursue this calling and embrace this trust to create a world of 2am friends.
The Academic Roundtable is a generative, multiday roundtable seminar offered to attendees at the Summer Institute desiring to cultivate their ongoing research in a community forum.
Note: those who have submitted papers for the Academic Roundtable will automatically be registered for these sessions as their afternoon seminar choice.
Participants in the roundtable will meet together to hear and share papers, provide feedback and suggestions for future research, and join in generative discussions about the implications of the papers presented.
The Roundtable is an interdisciplinary forum welcoming scholarly presentation that draws on the perspectives of researchers from a diverse range of backgrounds and career stages.
Paper submission is required to participate in the Roundtable.
