An Unexpected Journal: Celebrating Planet Narnia: An Apologetic View on on the Redemptive Power of Stories
Sobre aquest llibre
Only now, after ten years under its influence, have we begun to consider the magnitude of Planet Narnia's effects, and perhaps it is best to begin such an index by cultivating a jovial atmosphere of appreciation. Thus we curated this issue to celebrate both Dr. Ward and his stellar work.
Photography: Lancia E. Smith
Illustrations: Virginia de la Lastra
Artwork: Ryan Grube.
Contributors:
Adam L. Brackin: "Quarantine," a short story.
Annie Crawford: "The Cure Has Begun."
Brenton Dickieson: "(Re)Considering the Planet Narnia Thesis," a challenging essay to the thesis.
Ryan Grube: "For Your Contemplation"
Malcolm Guite: "Planet Narnia as Creative Inspiration," an essay; "The Daily Planet," a poem; "The Circle Dance", a poem.
Marshall Liszt: "Gravitational Pull," a reflection.
Louis Markos: "Why We Love to Visit Narnia."
Jason Monroe: "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the Rehabilitation of Practical Reason."
Holly Ordway: "A Seven-Day's Journey through the Heavens," a poem
Jahdiel Perez: "Where Paradoxes Play," Michael Ward on Christian Orthodoxy.
Josiah Peterson: "A Defense of Planet Narnia."
John Mark Reynolds: "An Unexpected Journey: Imaginative Apologetics and the Ward Moment," A personal reflection from Dr. John Mark Reynolds on the origins of the apologetics program at Houston Baptist University.
Michael Ward: "Seven Questions," an interview with Dr. Michael Ward and An Unexpected Journal, and "Return to Planet Narnia" with additional support for the planetary thesis.
Donald T. Williams: "C.S. Lewis, A Life," a poem.
Kyoko Yuasa: "Table Narnia: Fugue to Evangelical Adventure," an essay on the symbolism of the table throughout the Chronicles.
Sobre l'autor
Adam L. Brackin, Ph.D — Doc to his friends — is an independent media consultant, new-media apologist, writer, and sometimes professor. His teaching and research interests include: Social Media, Transmedia, & ARG, all forms of non-linear & interactive narrative, story mechanics models, and video game studies & design.
Annie Crawford lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and three teenage daughters. She currently homeschools, teaches humanities courses, and serves on the Faith & Culture team at Christ Church Anglican while working to complete a Masters of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.
Brenton Dickieson is writing a PhD thesis on the spiritual theology of C.S. Lewis at the University of Chester. He teaches at Signum University and The King's College, and writes the popular faith, fiction, and fantasy blog, www.aPilgrimInNarnia.com.
Virginia de la Lastra is an MD from Chile with a specialty in clinical microbiology. She works at Universidad de los Andes medical school, Hospital Dipreca, Teen Star program, and at the Reproductive Health Research Institute (RHRI). In 2016, she earned a Master’s degree in Apologetics from Houston Baptist University. During her studies there, she discovered a love for drawing and has been doing it ever since. Now, she illustrates for the American Chesterton Society, An Unexpected Journal, Sociedad de Chesterton Chile, Teen Star program, RHRI, and of course, for her medical students, nieces, nephews and little neighbors.
Ryan Grube earned his M.A. in Apologetics from HBU, where he studied under Drs. Ordway and Ward, among others. The experience led him to undertake a multi-year, cross-disciplinary study of semiotics and formal causality, the lessons of which he hopes to share soon in published form.
Malcolm Guite is a poet and priest, working as Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. He also teaches for the Divinity Faculty and for the Cambridge Theological Federation, and lectures widely in England and North America on Theology and Literature. He is the author of What do Christians Believe? Granta (2006); Faith Hope and Poetry (Ashgate 2010, paperback 2012); Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury 2012); The Singing Bowl: Collected Poems (Canterbury 2013); The Word in the Wilderness (Canterbury 2014); Waiting on the Word (Canterbury Press 2015); and Parable and Paradox (Canterbury Press 2016). He contributed the Chapter on Lewis as a poet to the Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (CUP 2010).
Marshall Arthur Liszt is a multimedia artist, freelance photographer, and longtime admirer of Planet Narnia whose most recent interests include liminality, environmental hiddenness, and numinous suggestion. He frequently alternates between academic and aesthetic pursuits, especially where they intersect with theology.
Louis Markos, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his 18 books include On The Shoulders of Hobbits and Lewis Agonistes.
Jason holds a B.A. from York College in York, NE, where he studied English and Psychology. He also recently completed his M.A. in Christian Apologetics from Houston Baptist University. He grew up in Pierre, SD and currently lives in Spearfish, SD. His primary research and writing interests are Inklings studies, philosophy of science, and Catholic theology. He volunteers at his local parish as a cantor, drummer, and RCIA teacher, and he likes to hike and snowboard in the beautiful Black Hills.
Holly Ordway is Professor of English and a faculty member in the M.A. in Apologetics at Houston Baptist University; she holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her most recent book is Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith (Emmaus Road, 2017); she has contributed chapters to volumes such as C.S. Lewis at Poets' Corner; C.S. Lewis's List; Women and C.S. Lewis; and The Inklings and King Arthur. She is also a Subject Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies and a published poet. Her academic work focuses on imaginative and literary apologetics, and on the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her current book project is Tolkien’s Modern Sources: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (forthcoming from Kent State University Press, 2019).
Jahdiel Perez is a D.Phil (Ph.D) Candidate of Theology and Literature at the University of Oxford. He is President of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society and also a Doctoral Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. Under the supervision of Alister McGrath and Michael Ward, Jahdiel’s doctoral work seeks to develop a theology of laughter from the writings of C.S. Lewis. Prior to Oxford, Jahdiel was preaching and teaching at his home church in Boston, Massachusetts, while earning an M.Div from Harvard University. He lives in St. Stephen's House, Oxford, with his wife Ariel.
Josiah Peterson is debate coach and instructor of rhetoric at the King’s College and is enrolled in HBU’s MAA program in Cultural Apologetics. He lives in New York with his wife Rachelle and daughter Hosanna. His primary scholarly interest is in the work of C.S. Lewis.
Dr. John Mark Reynolds is the President of the Saint Constantine School, a kindergarten through college program describe by the national media as one of the most radical ideas in college education. He’s is a senior fellow in the humanities at The Kings College and a Fellow of the Center For Science and Culture at The Discovery Institute. He is the former provost of Houston Baptist University. He was the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute, the Socratic, great books-centered honors program at Biola University. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Rochester, where he wrote his dissertation analyzing cosmology and psychology in Plato’s Timaeus. Dr. Reynolds is the author of numerous books, including When Athens Met Jerusalem: an Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought and is the editor of The Great Books Reader. He is a frequent blogger and lecturer on a wide range of topics including ancient philosophy, classical and home education, politics, faith, and virtue. John Mark attends St. Paul Orthodox Church in Katy, Texas with his parents, brother, wife, and children. An avid technophile, the lights, speakers, and computers in his house can all be controlled by his phone, to both cool and disastrous effect. He loves Disneyland, Star Trek, and the Green Bay Packers. John Mark and his wife Hope have four homeschool-graduate children: L.D., Mary Kate, Ian and Jane.
Lancia E. Smith is an author, photographer, teacher, and business owner based in Colorado. She is editor-in-chief of the online quarterly magazine Cultivating the Good, True, & Beautiful, and is founder of The Cultivating Project, a discipling initiative for Christians engaged in the arts.
Donald T. Williams, PhD, is a border dweller, permanently camped out on the borders between theology and literatyre, serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, Narnia and Middle Earth. He serves as R. A. Forrest Scholar at Toccoa Falls College and is the author of Deeper Magic: The Theology behind the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Baltimore: Square Halo Press, 2016).
Michael Ward is Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Texas. Professor Ward is the author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press), coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press) and presenter of the BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis's death (22 November 2013), Dr. Ward had the privilege of unveiling a permanent national memorial to him in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, London. He is the co-editor of a book of essays about this commemoration, entitled C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner 168 (Wipf & Stock). He studied English at Oxford, Theology at Cambridge, and has a PhD in Divinity from the University of St Andrews and an honorary doctorate in letters from Hillsdale College, Michigan. For three years in the 1990s he worked as resident warden of The Kilns, Lewis’s Oxford home. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as ‘the foremost living Lewis scholar’. Michael’s chief claim to fame, however, is that he handed a pair of X-ray spectacles to 007 in the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough.
Kyoko Yuasa is a lecturer of English Literature at Fuji Women’s University, Japan. She is the author of “C.S. Lewis and Christian Postmodernism: Jewish Laughter Reversed” in Inklings Forever (2017), C. S. Lewis and Christian Postmodernism: Word, Image and Beyond (2016), and Japanese translator of Bruce L. Edwards’s A Rhetoric of Reading: C.S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy (2007).
