This fall, Desire and God will be hosting a national conference titled The Romantic Rationalist,

God, Life, and Imagination in the work of CS Lewis.

The conference will be held in Minneapolis on September 27, 28, and 29, and speakers will

include you, of course, Pastor John, along with Phil Reichen, Randy Alcorn, Doug Wilson,

Kevin Van Hooser, and others.

So Pastor John, why a national conference this year in honor of CS Lewis's legacy?

November 22, 2013 marks 50 years since CS Lewis died in 1963, same day that John Kennedy

died, same day that Aldous Huxley died, and that is the reason for this particular year.

But behind the occasion is the man and his extraordinary influence in so many different

ways.

This fall, in November, on the 22nd, he will be honored by having a memorial put in the

poet's corner of Westminster Abbey, along with the likes of Jeffrey Chaucer, Charles

Dickens, Robert Browning, William Shakespeare, Herbert Spencer, an extraordinary thing

for a 20th century Christian apologist, writer of fiction, scholar of medieval literature

to receive.

JK Rowling, who of course wrote the Harry Potter series, if you go to her Wikipedia website,

she talks about the influence of Lewis on her as a child, and then on her writing of

those phenomenally popular works.

And everybody today now, amazingly, because of the movies, has heard of J.R.R. Tolkien,

Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, and Tolkien was an inveterate perfectionist who never

could get anything published.

And Lewis recognized the skills, the power of his storytelling ability.

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