Wade Center

In our anxiety-ridden age, we are all seeking a home where we feel safe, loved, and accepted. But what happens if no place on earth and no moment in time satisfies your deepest longings for home and community? Join Dr. Jim Beitler, Director of the Marion E. Wade Center, and co-host Aaron Hill as they connect with Amy Baik Lee, author of This Homeward Ache. Explore what C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and George MacDonald might teach us about the difference between home-sickness, nostalgia, and "this homeward ache;" how we should respond to Sehnsucht; and Clyde S. Kilby's resolutions for a life well-lived.

We're back! Join Dr. Jim Beitler, Director of the Marion E. Wade Center, and co-host Aaron Hill as they connect with Jonathan Rodgers, author of The Wilderking Trilogy and host of the celebrated podcast, The Habit. Recently republished by our friends over at The Rabbit Room, Jim and Aaron discuss the first novel in Rodger's Wilderking trilogy, The Bark of the Bog Owl. Learn how to be a writer even if you don't feel like one, how to accept and embrace God's plan (and timing) for your life, and how Wade Center authors such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien inspired and helped shape Rodger's own fantasy stories.

We're back! Join Dr. Jim Beitler, Director of the Marion E. Wade Center, and co-host Aaron Hill as they sit down with Dr. Kristen L. Page to discuss everything from how C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien portrayed ecosystems and environmentalism in The Chronicles of Narnia to The Lord of the Rings, to how studying ecology can help us understand our place in the order of Creation, to Dr. Page's recent Hansen lectures published as the book, The Wonders of Creation. Don't forget to check out Dr. Page's new podcast "about the stories we hear from the landscapes around us" called Listen Here.

We're back! In our first new episode of Season 7, Dr. Jim Beitler, Director of the Marion E. Wade Center, and co-host Aaron Hill sit down for a jovial and wide-ranging discussion with Dr. Matthew J. Milliner. Topics ranges from one of Charles William's most praised works, The Descent of the Dove, to Dr. Milliner's recent book The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations, and the dangers of experimenting and re-inventing Christianity as a spiritual explorer. 

To celebrate the start of the Wade Center's new Director, Dr. Jim Beitler (Professor of English) we decided to re-release an archival episode recorded and released back in July 2019.

'Rhetoric’ is often a byword for hollow or negative speech. In truth, rhetoric is the art of persuasion. This week, Dr. Jim Beitler discusses his new book, Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church. Of the five figures featured in Beitler’s book, we discuss the rhetoric of C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers. What can we learn from their example, and how can properly “seasoned speech” assist us in persuasively communicating the truth of the gospel?

Our dear friends and co-hosts of the podcast, Drs. Crystal & David C. Downing, are retiring as co-directors of the Wade Center in June. Professor of English, Dr. Jim Beitler will serve as the Wade Center's new director starting in July. To bid the Downings a fond farewell and pass the baton to our new director, we decided to share some of our favorite Wade author quotes.

If you would like to tell the Downings how much the podcast has meant to you, send them an email at [email protected] and we'll pass it along.

Despair not, faithful listeners! Dr. Beitler and Producer Aaron Hill will return with new episodes, a new format, and new topics in September. To tide you over until we re-launch, we will be re-releasing some of our favorite episodes, starting next week with Dr. Beitler's episode on "The Rhetoric of Lewis and Sayers" from July 2019.

Through his writings, C.S. Lewis emphasized the importance of travel and learning for through these two activities we gain the needed perspective to see life through the lens of "many places" and "many times." In this week's episode, Drs. Crystal and David C. Downing sit down with author's Dr. Alan Snyder and Jamin Metcalf to discuss their recently published book on C.S. Lewis and history, Many Times & Many Places (2023). Does history have a plot or a coherent storyline? Can we read and interpret history? Is every good event attributable to God and every evil event attributable to the sins of men? What is the value of studying history in an age that is enamored with progress and infected with chronological snobbery?

In the first half of the 20th century, England elites like T.S. Eliot were trying to devalue John Milton and elevate John Donne—exchanging one 17th-century English poet for another. At the height of World War II, C.S. Lewis took up arms against these oppressors and defended Milton in a series of lectures that would later be published as A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). Since then, every aspiring scholar has had to grapple with Lewis, the lion in the path of Milton studies. In this week's episode, Drs. Crystal and David C. Downing sit down with Dr. David Urban (Professor of English at Calvin University) to discuss how Paradise Lost and Lewis's Preface to it serves as a crucial lens through which to read and interpret Lewis's fiction and non-fiction works.

While he never visited America, C.S. Lewis and his works have greatly impacted the American religious landscape. While many general readers associate Lewis primarily with The Chronicles of Narnia (1950), before his appearance on the cover of Time in 1947 Americans viewed C.S. Lewis quite differently. In this week's episode Drs. Crystal and David C. Downing sit down to interview Dr. Mark A. Noll about his new book C.S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935–1947 (2024). Stay tuned until the end to learn how you can get a discounted (and signed) copy of Dr. Noll's book.

In many ways, C.S. Lewis was both a man ahead of and behind the times. His approach to science and theology was based upon his professorial comprehension of the Medieval world and what he called "The Model." In this week's episode, Drs. Crystal and David C. Downing sit down with Producer Aaron Hill to discuss Lewis's last non-fiction book, The Discarded Image (1964). Based on a series of lectures and published posthumously, David, Crystal, and Aaron discuss how the treasures and insights contained within this often overlooked book by C.S. Lewis on the cosmology and worldview constructed by great thinkers and writers of the Middle Ages.