This fall Desiring God will be hosting a national conference titled, "The Romantic Rationalist, God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. 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 C.S. Lewis's legacy? November 22, 2013 marks 50 years since C.S. 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 Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, along with the likes of Geoffrey 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.

J.K. 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. He recommended him for a Nobel Prize and he encouraged him along, and so in a sense you could say that Lewis is kind of the grandfather of the Tolkien Lord of the Rings series that everybody loves these days.

He was a writer of fiction in his own right because of the Chronicles of Narnia, 100 million copies sold in 47 languages, three successful movies, not as successful as The Lord of the Rings, but still remarkable influence in the 21st century of a man who considered that his work, he thought his works would be forgotten within five years.

So not only was he a writer of fiction and has an ongoing legacy that way, but he was probably most known for the past 60, 70 years as a Christian defender of the faith, an apologist for ordinary folks. His book Mere Christianity has sold in the millions. CT, Christianity Today, ranked it third among the most influential Christian books since 1945, I think.

He made famous that liar, lunatic Lord trilemma, it's called, where Jesus Christ cannot be viewed as merely the ordinary, upright, moral teacher minus divinity because he said so many crazy things so that he was either a liar when he said before Abraham was I am, or he was a lunatic, Lewis said, on the level of a man who thought he was a poached egg.

And so let's have none of this nonsense about how we love the moral teachings of this wonderful man when he in fact should be in a sane asylum or in prison because of his lying immorality or his lunacy if you don't think he's Lord. That was the amazing impact that he had in Christian apologetics.

And it was an enormous influence on Christians, people like me. I mean, I would put Lewis in the top five people on the planet who have influenced me. And the folks that are coming to this conference, I don't know if they talk like that. I think Doug Wilson talks even more lavishly.

He said, I heard him say that C.S. Lewis has had a greater impact on him than the sum of all the other writers he has ever read. I mean, that's just stunning when you think what Wilson has read. And then I know Randy Alcorn in his fiction is profoundly influenced, and Kevin Van Hooser, we're going to hear some surprising things from him, I think, with regard to the theological way that imagination works that come over from Lewis, and Phil Ryken as a president of an institution loves C.S.

Lewis. So we're doing this conference, Tony, because we have a love affair with this man, and we have a debt to pay. Thank you, Pastor John. The date, again, for the conference is September 27, 28, and 29 here in Minneapolis, so save those dates. The conference is titled "The Romantic Rationalist, and Life and Imagination in the Work of C.S.

Lewis." More details and registration information will be available soon at DesiringGod.org on the blog and under the events tab. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. 1 Desiring God.org - www.desiringgod.org - 1-888-888-6343 - www.desiringgod.org - www.desiringgod.org-