Dr. Steve Turley - The Abolition of Sanity: C.S. Lewis on the Consequences of Modernism

C live Staples Lewis, or Jack as he preferred, was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Northern Island, to Albert J. Lewis and Florence Augusta Hamilton. He had one older brother, Warren, who was born a couple of years prior. Shortly after his mother succumbed to cancer in 1908, Lewis was enrolled at the Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, and two years later, attended a boarding school at Campbell College, Belfast. Because of a respiratory illness, he enrolled at a prep school close to Malvern College, where he would later attend in September of 1913. He was accepted to Oxford University in 1916, but soon after, volunteered for active duty in the British Army during World War I.

He returned to Oxford and in 1925 graduated with a focus on Greek and Latin Literature and philosophy. He accepted a teaching post in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he remained for 29 years until he became professor of medieval and renaissance literature at Cambridge in 1954. It was during this time that Lewis rediscovered the Christian faith, largely through the influence of his colleague, J.R.R. Tolkien. And it was also during this period that he published many of his greatest works, such as The Pilgrims Regress (1933), The Great Divorce (1945), and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).

In 1956, he married the American writer Helen Joy Davidman, who soon became ill and died of cancer in July of 1960. Lewis died shortly thereafter on November 22, 1963 and was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Oxford. He is remembered as one of the most beloved writers and Christian apologists of all time.