C. S. Lewis Scholar to Speak for 2011 Convocation

Dr. Louis Markos (Photo: Michael Tims)

Noted C. S. Lewis scholar Louis Markos will be the featured speaker for the 2011 Convocation at Southwestern Adventist University. The annual event is scheduled for the Keene Seventh-day Adventist Church on Friday evening, Sept. 2, beginning at 8.

“Convocation is a reminder of our roots in the Western University tradition,” says President Eric Anderson.   The annual event features a guest speaker, inspiring music and a procession by teaching faculty in full academic regalia. The intention of the service is to set the tone for the school year.

Louis Markos’ topic for Convocation will be “Defending the Faith: Learning to Be an Apologist,” where he will use C. S. Lewis as an example of a Christian apologist who “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian while still living in a modern, post-Enlightenment world.” His talk will encourage students to offer a logical defense for their faith.

Markos is a professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University and holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities.  At HBA he offers courses in British Romantic Poetry, Literary Theory and the Classics, as well as in Victorian Poetry and Prose, Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Prose, C. S. Lewis, Mythology, Epic and Film.

Markos speaks all over the United States, generally on topics related to C. S. Lewis, but embracing more widely science, the arts, education and apologetics.

In addition to his presentation for Convocation, Markos will speak on “God and Science: Evidence for Design in the Universe” as the opening presenter for this year’s Saxon Lecture Series. “God and Science” will be presented at the Wharton Auditorium at 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 3.

Marcos is the author of three books: From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age, and Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World.

He has also produced two lecture series with the Teaching Company, an organization that hires accomplished professors from around the country to put together lecture series. His first series offers a 2,500-year survey of literary theory: From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author. His second series offers an overview and analysis of all the major works of his favorite author: The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis.

“I am dedicated to the concept of the professor as public educator,” says Markos. “I firmly believe that knowledge must not be walled up in the academy, but must be freely and enthusiastically disseminated to all those ‘who have ears to hear.’ As a specifically Christian professor, I also adhere to a second goal: to fuse into a single stream the humanist strivings of Athens and the Christian truths of Jerusalem.

“My call is to teach Christian students that they need not be afraid of knowledge, but that indeed all truth is God’s truth,” he says. “I teach them that it is the duty of every enlightened individual to seek to know and to participate in the flow of human ideas through a study of and a grappling with the major expressions of the human imagination, and that this duty is not inconsistent with Scripture but is rather a sublime affirmation that man IS a rational creature created in the image of God whose deepest yearnings are for the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

Convocation services and the Saxon Lecture Series are free and open to the public.

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