IQ 2: A Half Pint, Fellow Spotlights, and an Inklings Student Group
Inklings Quarterly
February 13, 2024
A Half Pint with the Inklings Project
David Bates, co-host of Pints with Jack, interviewed two members of the Inklings Project team for a “Half Pint” to chat about the project. Visit pintswithjack.com/half-pint-with-the-inklings-project/ to tune into the conversation!
Topics covered include: the founding of the Inklings Project, its mission, associated colleges, resources, and possible expansion.
From a Fellow
Dr. John Whitmire | Teaching C. S. Lewis at Western Carolina University
It’s been almost 20 years since I first taught a course on the Inklings, which I initially modeled on a class I had taken with Dr. Ralph Wood as an undergraduate in the early 1990’s. In a course entitled “Philosophical and Religious Classics” within the department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Carolina University, I’ve had the freedom and flexibility to explore a “seminal text or thinker in philosophical or religious thought,” and my class on Lewis and Tolkien has been particularly well-received by our students over the past two decades. (It’s certainly the class students most often ask when I’ll be teaching again!) I’ve rotated through a number of texts over the years, but I have usually come back to Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and Perelandra in the first half, followed by Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” and The Lord of the Rings in the second. Beginning with Mere Christianity, I’ve found, gives me the ability to discuss some of the basics of Lewis’ understanding of virtue ethics and foundational Christian beliefs, both with students who are coming from a similar intellectual and religious milieu, as well as with others who are coming from very different places. We’re then able to trace out how some of those key themes – such as moral realism; evil as privation and twisting of the good; pride as absolute self-centering; faith as the capacity to hold onto beliefs one takes to be reasonable in the face of shifting moods and emotions – are further broadened and enriched in both Lewis and Tolkien’s literary works. “On Fairy Stories” then provides a nice theoretical foundation and good preparation for reading The Lord of the Rings, particularly in Tolkien’s articulation of the notions of recovery, consolation, and eucatastrophe there.
This semester, I’m teaching a cross-listed version of the class, with roughly a dozen students also taking it for honors credit. I know at many institutions like ours – a regional comprehensive university in the UNC system – it can be difficult to offer enough upper-level honors courses, so I piloted a few years ago the idea of a cross-listed honors section with a regular section of the Inklings class. This semester, my honors students are reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Silmarillion in addition to the other texts. Each student will be writing a précis and co-leading one of our additional seminar meetings, in addition to crafting a short essay that brings one of those texts into contact with a central theme in those the whole class is reading. This extra reading, writing, and discussion offers them a more intensive experience for their honors credit, and I’d definitely recommend this approach to others who are looking for a way to extend the reach of a class on the Inklings to honors students at their own institutions.
While I’ve been working for several years on the idea that hoping against hope gradually becomes the central virtue of The Lord of the Rings – surpassing Sam’s courage and Gandalf’s wisdom, and at least as foundational as Bilbo and Frodo’s mercy – it has only been in the past few years (and particularly while working on a recent essay with my colleague David Henderson) that I’ve come to see that message as having such a deep resonance for some of our increasing environmental anxieties. From the Ents in Isengard to the Hobbits’ return to the Shire, there’s a great deal here that speaks not just in general terms to friendship, simple pleasures, and growth of character through modeling ourselves on exemplars of virtue, but to the very specific contemporary fear that even if the worst ecological catastrophes are averted, “much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth,” as Théoden worries (in III.8, “The Road to Isengard”). Cultivating the practice of hope without guarantee is difficult, but there is indeed consolation to be found in myth and fairy-story. For myself, teaching the Inklings has become a way to connect with my students not just through their intellect, but their imagination, their passions, and their fears. For faculty hoping to engage on that level, and to spend time talking about issues that matter deeply to their students, I can’t encourage teaching the Inklings enough. I couldn’t have become the kind of teacher I am without them.
John F. Whitmire, Jr.
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religion
UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching at WCU, 2019
Fellow Spotlights
Dr. Adam Pelser | Teaching C. S. Lewis at the United States Air Force Academy
In the fall 2023 term, Inklings Project Fellow Dr. Adam Pelser had a wonderful experience teaching an engaged group of 16 student (“cadets”) in his course “C.S. Lewis and Philosophy” at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Professor Pelser has taught versions of this course as a “special topics” elective before, but this was his first time teaching it as an official, biennially offered course with its own course number and title.
The class read and discussed the arguments of many of Lewis’s most philosophical books and essays including The Abolition of Man, The Four Loves, Miracles, The Problem of Pain, and The Weight of Glory, along with writings by some of Lewis’s philosophical influences and critics. The cadets also worked together in small groups to make presentations on the philosophical themes in some of Lewis’s beloved fiction books including Till We Have Faces, Out of the Silent Planet, and The Silver Chair.
In the end-of-course feedback, one cadet wrote that it was her/his “Favourite class at USAFA so far; I’m sad for it to end. Dr. Pelser is phenomenal. … He loves what he does and he is very encouraging and helpful. I got to know people in my class fairly well, discussions were fun and most interesting, content was great, [and] I got a lot from discussing the readings.”
Dr. Pelser looks forward to teaching this course again in two years when he plans to incorporate new readings and ideas based on what he has learned from the other Inklings Project Fellows.
Dr. Leslie Baynes | Exciting Changes to Her Longstanding Course on C. S. Lewis
Dr. Leslie Baynes, Associate Professor at Missouri State University in the Languages, Cultures, and Religions department, has been teaching her course “C. S. Lewis” for over a decade. In Dr. Baynes’ course, students are immersed not only in Lewis’s life and writings, but also in the context surrounding his works, as well as the critiques and challenges Lewis’s writings have received. The course begins with an introduction to Lewis with his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy. The students then move through the The Chronicles of Narnia, reading them through the lens of Dr. Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, which illuminates connections between the Narnia books and Greco-Roman religions. Next, students dive into Lewis’s famous apologetics, including Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters; during this time, students start the class with short presentations and even get the chance to compose their own “Screwtape Letters.” The course culminates with what Dr. Baynes identifies as Lewis’s “best novel,” Till We Have Faces, which, she says, “pulls together everything we’ve discussed all semester: myth, Joy, faith vs. reason, the “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” argument, theosis, and much more.”
This past fall, Dr. Baynes taught “C. S. Lewis” again, but with significant changes. In the reflection below, Dr. Baynes describes these changes and her experiences with them, which “succeeded beyond [her] most optimistic expectations.”
Any student with any major is welcome in my class, but I’m always particularly glad to see English majors. Last fall, the Missouri State English department agreed to cross list the C. S. Lewis course, and several who enrolled under those auspices were more advanced students, some of whom were working on a Master’s degree. I was delighted, but their presence did pose a challenge: how best to integrate graduate students of English into an undergraduate course in religion? It was easy to differentiate content (read more books!), but they also needed deeper engagement with the material and with me than we could pull off during regularly scheduled class times. Because this was a course on Lewis, however, the answer came easily: Oxford-style tutorials. While Lewis worked with his students in his rooms at Magdalen College, I decided to take a page from the Inklings and meet in a more convivial setting. We couldn’t meet in a pub, but we did gather downtown at a popular coffee house. I was a little apprehensive at first, having never done such a thing with students who were being graded, but it was smashing. They wrote essays in advance and sent them to me, and we discussed them and much else in a warm, caffeinated environment. Although I slotted an hour for our meetings, we always went well over time. I hope they learned a lot; I certainly did.
The second significant change in the course has to do with the advent of accessible artificial intelligence coupled with the effects of trends in secondary education both pre- and post-pandemic. Even before tools like ChatGPT became available, and even before the pandemic, students were struggling to write. I, like many others in academe, have been forced to deal with them submitting work they did not write, with the resultant heartbreak all around. Although students enrolled in the course last semester did produce many written assignments, I decided not to give them the essay exam I had in the past; instead, they would meet with me for an oral exam. Like the “Oxford tutorials,” this practice was as new to me as it was to them, and also like the tutorials, the results astonished me. They knocked it out of the park. Addressing the same questions that were on the old exam, they could bring with them only the notes that fit on a 3x5 index card. If their answers were jejune, I could push them, and they delivered. If I had been reading essays, I wouldn’t have been able to ask them for more detail or to make more connections between points. They got higher grades than they would have, and they learned more about what makes for a thoughtful response. The new exam format set up a conversation as opposed to a subject/object evaluation, and the students unanimously agreed that, despite some pre-meeting jitters, they loved it. Thank you to the Inklings Fellows Project for acting as a sounding board as I worked through these changes in the C. S. Lewis course.
The C. S. Lewis Inklings Society at Brown University
Written by Michael Yeh, student founder and former president
What is the Brown University C. S. Lewis Inklings Society?
College students' calendars are impressive. Full course loads, part-time jobs, research, and extracurriculars—all while finding time to hang out with friends.
Two things that college students don’t always do a good job of finding time for:
Thinking about the big questions
a) Yes, bigger than what Fed should set the interest rate at
b) No, taking ECON 102 doesn’t make you an expert, even if you talk loudly in the dining hall
c) Note: I’m an Econ major who talks about interest rates in the dining hall
Reading for fun
The C. S. Lewis Inklings is a student group at Brown University dedicated to these two things, through reading, appreciating, and discussing the works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and their contemporaries.
Creating the student group
At the adamant recommendation of my two older sisters, I took a class at Brown called “Beyond Narnia: The Literature of C. S. Lewis” taught by Dr. Timothy Flanigan. It was the spring of 2021 and the only class I was able to take in person that semester, and the first class I was able to take in person for nearly a year, since March of 2020. Most semesters, I would dread a two and a half hour seminar at 3:00 PM on a Friday, but this semester, I looked forward to those two and a half hours every week. The class was a beacon of light because it combined Lewis’s fantastical stories and insightful essays with real, person-to-person connection.
If you’ve ever been on a college campus tour, you’ve probably heard the line: “And here at [insert school], we have a club for most anything you can think of, and if we don’t have something you’re looking for, you can create one yourself!”
I hopped on www dot make a club at Brown, collected a list of signatures demonstrating interest, spoke to Dr. Flanigan who gladly agreed to advise the club, and the Brown University Inklings was born.
Club meetings and activities
A typical Inklings meeting has cozy book club energy. We gather in a room (ideally with couches) once a week and share some combination of pizza, cookies, apple cider, or other drinks and snacks. We’ll read out loud as a group for 20-30 minutes and then discuss. Some semesters we have focused on one work, such as The Screwtape Letters or The Fellowship of the Ring, and other semesters we have read a variety of works including The Four Loves, “On Fairie-Stories,” The Weight of Glory, and many others!
We have also hosted larger events open to larger groups. In the fall of 2022, we were able to get The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C. S. Lewis on-screen at the local IMAX in Providence. Over 150 students, faculty, and community members (mostly from Brown but also from 8 other colleges) filled up the theaters.
We have also hosted trivia nights, The Lord of the Rings movie showings, communal meals, and other events for the club and wider Brown community.
Tips for a successful student group
Helpful things to know about running an Inklings club include:
Poll your group for what they want to read, but be decisive early in the semester
If you can, fund the purchase of physical books for the group
Align with your group on whether people want to read outside of club time or not
Bring food and drinks
Come to meetings with a Questions/Ideas guide prepared, but don’t be afraid not to use it if the conversation goes a different direction (usually those are the best meetings!)
Spice up regular meetings with themes, jeopardy (factile is a great website), kahoot, etc. and bring prizes
Start planning larger events early
Work with a co- or vice-president to share the workload
Spread leadership positions to get more people more involved
Reserve a great room early in the semester
Write fun emails! (Exhibit A below)
Dear Inklings,
that one professor be like^^
Come out to our meeting this week on Tuesday, February 28, from 6:30 - 7:30 PM in Page Robinson 411!! We'll have reading, food, and drinks for the group. Additionally, we'll have the prizes from our Valentine's Day meeting two weeks ago.
Looking forward to it :)
Best,
Michael
Leaving the club in good hands
After graduating in May, two of my friends and fellow Inklings, Daniel Hu and Eitan Zemel, took over the club as co-presidents. As important as leading is, it is as or more important to get younger members involved and ready to take the reins eventually. They are leading the club well, and I am confident that they will find excellent successors when the time comes.
I hope that Inklings at Brown can read, think, talk and step through the wardrobe for a long, long time.
If you are interested in starting an Inklings student group on your campus, feel free to reach out to Michael at michael_yeh@alumni.brown.edu.
Quarterly Highlights
Inspiration: “There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” — J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Resource: CSLewisDoodle, a YouTube channel of readings, accompanied by wonderful illustrations, of select essays written by C. S. Lewis. The purpose of CSLewisDoodle is to make these essays easier to understand (great for visual learners)…For more resources, visit the Inklings Project Resources page.
Event: The Undiscovered C. S. Lewis Conference taking place in Oregon on September 5-8, 2024. Deadline for early bird registration and Call for Papers (see bottom of conference page here) is March 31st.
Interested in supporting the Inklings Project?
The Inklings Project exists because of the generosity of individuals. To make a one-time or recurring donation to the Inklings Project, please visit giving.nd.edu/inklings, or call 574-631-7164.
The University of Notre Dame is a 501(c) (3) tax exempt nonprofit corporation.
For past issues of the Inklings Quarterly, visit www.inklingsproject.org/quarterly.