Wade Center Wade Center at Wheaton College (IL)

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 wade@wheaton.edu 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.