I first encountered C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, then quickly consumed The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Abolition of Man before feeling like we’d hit a good place in our relationship. I tend to be cautious like that with authors. I don’t want to lose the (perhaps childish) affection that first obsessed me.…

Two Poets Laureate On Grief, Detachment, and Finding New Ways to Live, Part 1   In my role as the curator of three literary guides to prayer for Paraclete Press (At the Still Point, Light Upon Light, and the newly-released Between Midnight and Dawn), I have the coolest job. Not only do I get to…

The following is adapted from the preface to The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery. My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou…

Since I’ve been blogging here at Good Letters I have been contacted by several friends who knew me back when I was a Baptist. My friend Heidi asked, “Are you a universalist now?” Cliff wondered if I was, “denying or seriously doubting Jesus’ claim to be God.” Another asked if I was “still a believer,”…

I was reading Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si when I began an article called “What is Wrong with the West’s Economies?” Published in the August 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, the article is by Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society, and…