C.S. Lewis on Christianity: Suffering and Death
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the film Shadowlands before introducing Michael Ward.
C.S. Lewis’s writings bring the great questions of the Christian faith to life. Through his imaginative and invigorating style, Lewis answers these questions in ways that are compelling to those outside Christianity and energizing to those within the Christian faith.
The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed offer two very different approaches to suffering. In the former, Lewis addresses the intellectual problem raised by the existence of pain in a world created by a good and all-powerful God; and, in the latter, he presents a deeply personal account of his own suffering.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. |
| 0:10.8 | I'm Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:12.1 | And I'm Juan Davalos. |
| 0:13.1 | We're back with C.S. Louis on Christianity. |
| 0:15.5 | And we're going on to suffering and death today. |
| 0:18.3 | One of the things that's amazing about Lewis is his ability to |
| 0:22.2 | depict joyful celebrations and triumphs and feasts and all these lovely things, but he doesn't |
| 0:28.2 | shy away from the dark and the scary and the things that grieve you. And it's necessary in his |
| 0:34.6 | view to be able to comprehend and contemplate the dark and unsavory things |
| 0:40.3 | as well. They increase the joy of the celebration and they make it more real. And in this lecture, |
| 0:45.9 | we're going to go into that very deeply. Lewis looked at the problem of pain and essentially, |
| 0:52.2 | if you have a good God that created the world, why is there so much |
| 0:55.7 | pain and suffering in the world? And so Lewis will take a look at this in two different |
| 1:01.5 | books from two different ways, meaning in the problem of pain, he looks at it from a philosophical |
| 1:07.8 | point of view. Does it make sense? Is it logical for a good, |
| 1:12.4 | for a good God to create a world where there is pain? And then he looks at it from an emotional |
| 1:17.7 | point of view, and that book is called A Grief Observed. And one of the best ways that I've |
| 1:24.5 | seen this portrayed Lewis's views is in the movie Shadowlands. It's a |
| 1:29.2 | 1993 movie with Anthony Hopkins. And the movie covers the period of time when Lewis met his wife. |
| 1:36.4 | And he was married for a very short period of time. Three years or so. That's right. And because |
| 1:41.7 | she dies of cancer. And of of course the movie starts again with |
| 1:46.6 | lewis having this very philosophical view of pain and the famous line he says is that pain is god's |
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