Learning is a lifetime pursuit. You will, if you choose to, learn far more after school (no matter how many years you go or don’t go) than you will in the classroom. Every adult, I think, should make a choice:
Commit to a lifetime of exploration and discovery, or let others control your mind.
Here are some books I read in 2025. What choice will you make in 2026?
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled…When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys the papers for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows…He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” – That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis, 1945)
That Hideous Strength is part three of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, yet is so different from the first volumes, it stands as an independent tale – a dystopian one on par with its contemporary, 1984 by George Orwell. As with 1984, That Hideous Strength is just as relevant now, as it was decades ago.
A lesser author couldn’t pull off switching from a space setting to a terrestrial one, or changing the narration to that of the author, in this final volume. Nor could many authors successfully weave higher themes into a story, but Lewis was an intellectual – when that still meant something – with a penchant for converting high ideas into accessible stories.
Themes of manipulation and control by hidden powers, abuse of science, eugenics (now returning as transhumanism) all are very relevant in our day. Especially applicable are the dangers of turning science into a form of fundamentalism that reduces humans to nothing more than an accident. An accident with no real foundation of truth or reality. This fatal flaw was apparent in the materialist thinking of Lewis’ day, even more so now, with its modern evangelists like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, et al, masterfully camouflaging their beliefs with science, intermixing the two.
Lewis would also discuss these issues in his classic, The Abolition of Man, and even in the Narnian tale, The Magician’s Nephew. As postmodernism, secularism, transhumanism and other isms return – and the history of their past failures and terrors forgotten – Lewis’ works on the nature of man, science, scientism and society are more important than ever for those not content to be told by the oligarchies what to believe and how to live.
Lewis was a “prophetic critic” in his time, and apparently for our own.
“And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs…But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end…But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” – Samwise Gamgee, The Two Towers
This is perhaps J.R.R.Tolkien’s most famous passage about finding one’s Story, their Purpose. Often people don’t realize they are missing their purpose until thrust into a dire situation. That’s when one learns the true “measure of a man” (or woman), or one becomes Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
For most people, they know they are meant for something bigger. They know they have settled for what the world told them they should be doing, not what they were meant to be. Like when Captain Pike dares Kirk to be better:
“You can settle for less than an ordinary life, or do you feel like your meant for something better, something special?…I dare you to do better.”
Why do so many stories in our books and films feature the longing for something more? For something missing? Because this speaks to the longing in all of us. We are part of a greater Story, but we feel like we keep arriving forty minutes too late. John Eldredge writes in Epic:
“Notice every good story has the same ingredients. Love. Adventure. Danger. Heroism. Romance. Sacrifice. The Battle of Good and Evil. Unlikely heroes. Insurmountable odds…Things were once good, then something awful happened, and now a great battle must be fought or a journey taken…It’s true of every fairy tale, every myth, every Western, every epic…Have you ever wondered why?”
You are the answer. This is in everyone. For every vapid exhortation to “find one’s truth,” most let others define their truth. Never stop fighting until you achieve what you were gifted to be. Don’t let the world tell you what to be, or what to do. They want you compliant and ordinary. C.S. Lewis wrote, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Indeed. Too often we give up, give in. This is a war against you. Many forces want you to fail.
Still, the choice is yours.
I’d rather go down fighting in the arena.
One of the themes of the Watchers of the Light series is exactly this: Find your Story. Find your Purpose.
This is the tale we all find ourselves in. The one storytellers write about. The daily war of finding our purpose, our place in the Story, and what we were gifted to do.
You only fail if you do not fight for that purpose and your place in the Story.
John C. Lennox, Oxford professor of mathematics, is a throwback to a time when universities were full of intellectual scholars intent on uncovering knowledge, finding wisdom, and promoting academic freedom. Unlike many self-proclaimed intellectuals, or anointed celebrity experts, Lennox is neither condescending, nor afraid of questions. An everyman intellectual, his books such as God’s Undertaker and Gunning for God, have explored the intersection of religion and science, and why the two are not — and cannot be — separate realms. He has often debated the foremost minds of our day who disagree with him. In many ways, he is the heir to the legacy of another great Oxford thinker, C.S. Lewis.
The documentary, Against the Tide, hosted and narrated by Kevin Sorbo, traces Lennox’s intellectual journey. They explore the science and reason behind his beliefs. A humble, yet brilliant scholar and debater, he lays out evidence for a designed universe that defies naturalistic explanations. He also shows why his religious beliefs aren’t rooted in blind faith.
He goes into far more detail in his books, but Against the Tide is perfect introduction for seekers of truth and wisdom. If you are curious about the nature of the universe, and your place in it, Lennox is an excellent guide.
If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. [They will be] weaker, not stronger…a few hundreds of men [ruling] over billions upon billions of men. The final stage is come when Man…has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. – C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man , 1947
C.S. Lewis, best known for Narnia and books like Mere Christianity, was nearly prophetic in his warnings on what the abuse of science could become. Even the horrors of World War II and not cured people of turning science into a religion, or of the belief that humans could be altered and improved to the point of creating a new species. Here, in our own day, eugenics and transhumanism threaten once again to cross from helping humanity, to replacing us.
The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society is a collection of essays on C.S. Lewis’ thoughts and writings which are all more relevant today. They are warnings we should not ignore. Some of his works best expressing his insight not only include The Abolition of Man, but his sci-fi trilogy, collectively (and uncreatively) known as the Space Trilogy
Warnings from seventy-four years ago, about the abuse of science, its replacement by scientism or scientific materialism, as contemporary as if they were written today. Will our ignorance of the past, and distraction from the present, deliver us right over the edge?
Unfortunately, history often repeats itself. Because we let it.
Here’s a pair of books on four men of the 20th Century that still speak to us today: Churchill and Orwell and A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. Not one of them was a talking head or armchair expert. Each was a veteran of one or more of the century’s — and mankind’s — worst wars.
Winston Churchill warned there was no appeasing totalitarian governments. Evil regimes only ceased their scourge when facing a people who refused to surrender. Churchill’s prophetic voice was nearly ignored in this, and of what the world was to become in the Cold War. Flaws and all, he reached a level few “leaders” today can approach.
George Orwell experienced in the Spanish Civil War that all totalitarian governments were indistinguishable — whether fascist or communist — in their aims and results. His politics were polar opposite of Churchill’s, but they arrived at the same truths through life, not hypothetical debate. His books Animal Farm and 1984 emerged from those experiences, becoming timeless warnings that wherever power existed, abuse of that power would occur.
After surviving the trenches of World War I, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien became academic scholars. While their contemporaries were writing dismal books on the dark future of humanity, Lewis and Tolkien refused to give in to such defeatism. They eschewed the materialistic and naturalistic philosophies that had brought the world to its knees, and were also being used to paint a future of darkness for humanity. Their fantasy novels were more than fairy tales — they unveiled the hope and the Story that had been gifted to men and women — and that Evil could be crushed.
Out of a dark age came these bright lights. We would be dangerously amiss to snuff them out.
What were you made for? What is your Purpose? Your Story?
Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of…? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling…of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? …All the but hints of it — tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echos that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” – C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Fantasy tales are often populated with a wide array of beings. Elves, humans and dwarves are a common trio, along with trolls, orcs and countless other variations. Not all authors have filled their stories with these fantastic races to purposely tell stories of diversity or race-relations. However, long before terms like diversity were buzzing in everyone’s minds, two masters of fantasy had made a statement on equality among people. Joseph Loconte writes in A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War:
[J.R.R.] Tolkien and [C.S.] Lewis encountered the horrific progeny of [eugenics] in the trenches and barbed wire and mortars of the Great War [World War I] — and it gave them great pause about human potentiality…the characters in their novels possess a great nobility, creatures endowed with a unique capacity for virtue, courage, and love. Indeed, a vital theme throughout is the sacred worth of the individual soul in Middle-Earth and Narnia, every life is of immense consequence.
The “races” of Narnia and Middle-Earth are very much like us, always at odds with each other: Elves hate dwarves; elves look down on humans; hobbits are obviously different from their larger human cousins; orcs once were elves. And yet the fellowship of the ring throws together polar opposite, feuding races in a quest to the save the world.
Against all odds, they succeeded. A powerful message among the many in these stories.
Tolkien and Lewis began writing during a time when eugenics was on the rise. This misuse of science and philosophies pretending to be science was rationale to cleanse humanity of undesirable races, beliefs or attributes. People remember the result of this horror in World War II under the Nazis, yet don’t know that this thinking had been promoted among the “elite” thinkers and governments across the world for decades.
While many many post-WWI writers saw hopelessness, and others turned to Progress as a god to right humanity, Tolkien and Lewis saw the importance of every life. They wrote of evil that couldn’t be reasoned away — and could be hidden behind “science” and “progress.” The equality of peoples doesn’t automatically equate to the equality of ideas and actions. Even Tolkien’s “dreadful orcs are presented as rational beings” — but being rational isn’t the same as being on the side of virtue.
Middle-Earth and Narnia showed how mankind, even with its capacity for wrong, has innate qualities that can defeat the most terrible of evils; qualities that transcend superficial differences among people, and show that we are much more than a result of randomness and fate.
Check out the trailer for the upcoming series on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis:
Writers often draw us into the worlds and characters that burst from their imaginations. These “made-up” worlds are reason for some to shun this or that genre because they are imaginary. The truth, though, is that authors aren’t writing imaginary stories. Alister McGrath, in his biography of C.S. Lewis, explains:
Narnia is imaginative, not an imaginary, world. Lewis was quite clear that a distinction had to be drawn between those ideas. The “imaginary” is something that has been falsely imagined, having no counterpart in reality. Lewis regards such an invented reality as opening the way to delusion. The “imaginative” is something produced by the human mind as it tries to respond to something greater than itself…to “communicate more Reality to us.”
Lewis would use his imaginative world to explore serious themes like “origins of evil, nature of faith, and the human desire for God” — not unlike most writers have grand ideas of deep thoughts woven through their narrative.
Quite often their starting point to accomplish this is surprisingly very simple. Narnia started with “an image of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood.” Tolkien scrawled on a paper, “In a hole in he ground there lived a hobbit,” after the idea popped in his head and he “did not know why” it had. From these humble origins, grand tales came to life.
What lives in your imagination, ready to inspire, entertain and challenge?
Darrick Dean 