troutswayze

An Invitation to The Inklings

We are a free online apologetics discussion group for Christians interested in deepening the imaginative and philosophical grounds for our faith. Our focus is primarily, though not exclusively, on the literary and philosophical works of C.S. Lewis, arguably the 20th century’s greatest defender of the Christian faith.

There are no prerequisites other than a love of reading and thinking.

We are set to begin our first session of 2020.

Here’s how it works:

Sign up in the comments section below, making sure to enter your name and email address. (You may also contact me via Facebook)
On Sunday, April 12th, 2020 (and going forward every Sunday), I will send out info on the week’s subject material — as well as a link to a video lecture
Starting on Wednesday, April 15th (and going forward on every Wednesday evening), we will gather from 7-8pm for group discussion via web conference
The plan right now is to continue meeting through early June, 2020

Week One will consist of a general overview. And Week Two will be on how we as humans create meaning from information. Both are setup material for C.S. Lewis’s treatment of love in his The Four Loves and Till We Have Faces.

If you want to get ahead of the reading, we will be starting in Week Three on The Four Loves. You might want to go ahead and purchase both books now, if you don’t already own them.

-Jim Swayze

Introduction

An avid outdoorsman, fly fisherman, and lover of Oregon Pinot noir, Jim Swayze was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, where he still resides with his dear wife, Cristi. They have four children (three boys and a girl, now mostly grown). Jim completed his bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and English Literature at SMU and his masters in Apologetics at HBU. In addition to C.S. Lewis, from whom he derives primary inspiration, Jim is also strongly influenced by Tim Keller, Allan Bloom, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Why would I even want to believe?

This is about hypotheticals. And this is about God.

Before you get too up-in-arms, I’m not going to even try to offer up earth-shattering proof — as if that were even possible — for the existence of a deity who, by definition, is outside the natural world and therefore not knowable by the senses. (Though at least some of my fellow Christian thinkers would disagree, I just don’t think proof is possible, for or against).

I’d just like here to take a few moments to address those of you who might answer the question of desire posed by the title of this post some way like this:

“Even if God were real, which I’m fairly certain isn’t the case, I wouldn’t want to believe in a Divine-Being-in-the Sky, forever ready and willing to smite the unfaithful. I have no desire for some exclusive, unjust, narrow, regressive Somebody who would allow all the pain and suffering that occurs in this world — or who was so weak they could not prevent it.”

My friend, I get it. I don’t want that God either.

Let me ask you this: Have you ever had the experience of having a pretty firm idea about something — only to find out later that reality’s actually not much like what you had in your head? I don’t know, maybe you didn’t like superhero movies or coconut cream pie or early morning runs by the lake. But then you actually let go and watch the film, eat the pie, go for the run. And you think, if only for a moment, “Hey, maybe there is something to this.”

I’d humbly suggest that God is real, that the mass of humanity hasn’t been involved in some sort of monumental misunderstanding, and that if you desire to know more about Him, it’s there for the asking. And that, maybe just maybe, those who would answer the question of belief in the negative don’t really know the value of Whom it is they are rejecting.

This blog, Ad Caelos, is dedicated to that possibility. I hope you’ll read on.