C.S. Lewis Foundation Ventures 'Across the Pond' for the First Time

|PIC1|The C.S. Lewis foundation will host a summer conference entitled “Love Among the Ruins: On the Renewal of Character & Culture,” which will be held 7-16 July in Massachusetts, North America.

The C.S. Lewis Foundation, which has sponsored “C.S. Lewis Summer Institute” conferences in Oxford and Cambridge, England, since 1988, is “crossing the pond” for the first time to America. Since then, the Institute has emerged as one of the signal gatherings of Christians and seekers from many walks of life and a wide range of Christian traditions.

The 10-day event will feature internationally recognized authors, artists, and academics such as Joseph Pearce, Malcolm Guite, Dick Staub, Armand Nicholi, James-Emery White, and many more.

Speakers Malcom Guite, Chaplain of Girton College, will host a seminar entitled “Growing up with C.S. Lewis (and Staying Young with Jack!).”

|AD|According to Guite: “We are all called to grow up into the full stature of Christ, to let the joys and sorrows of life call out and develop the unique character that Christ himself planted in us. But as Lewis shows in his many writings, there's a big difference between true and false maturity. He has no time for the false cynicism and sophistication that passes for “being grown-up,” and his best characters retain, as he did, a magical, child-like spring of joy and imagination.

Guite’s seminar will explore how people can develop and build character and depth without losing grace and simplicity, by “growing up with Lewis.”

Other seminars include “Towards a Christian Response to Popular Culture,” by President of the Center for Faith & Culture Dick Staub. The seminar will analyze the power of popular culture despite its aesthetic & spiritual poverty and will then examine the church’s tendency towards withdrawing from, fighting or mirroring culture.

In addition to seminars, the conference schedule includes a trip to see the Boston Symphony perform at the nearby Tanglewood outdoor theater, and numerous other arts performances, lectures, and workshops.

C.S. Lewis, an author and scholar, was known for his Christian apologetics and for his fiction, especially the children’s series entitled The Chronicles of Narnia.