Essays by Lou Markos

Below are the titles and description of several essays that you might be interested in reading or skimming.  If you would like to access a copy of one of these essays, please click on the link.

Essays Dealing with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

  • The Good Guys and the Bad Guys: Teachable Moment in the Chronicles of Narnia: This essay discusses the need to teach children to discern good from evil and then demonstrates how the Chronicles of Narnia may help parents to do just that.
  • The Wardrobe, the Witch and the Lion: Click here to read my film reviews of the movie versions of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian.  Both reviews discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the films and how they are both faithful and unfaithful to the novels.
  • An Open Letter to Lovers of the Da Vinci Code: This essay takes a very different approach to the novel than the many books and essays that have been written over the last few years. Rather than uncover all the errors in the book, I try to get down to the core of why people have been drawn to the novel so strongly. I identify three longings that the novel inspires in its readers (the longing to break a code; the longing for the sacred feminine; the longing for incarnational magic) and then show that orthodox Christianity answers those longings more truly and powerfully than the Gnostic gospels that Brown so advocates.
  • And the Two Shall Be One: In this chapter from my book, The Dangers of Egalitarianism, I argue that masculinity and femininity are essential, innate qualities rather than mere social constructs, and that marriage between the sexes should be complementarian rather than egalitarian.  It fleshes out the two in one nature of marriage by inscribing it within the Christian mysteries of the Incarnation, the Trinity, the Sacraments, and the Great Marriage of Christ and the Church.  It also argues forcefully that “man” rather than “humanity” or “humankind” is the right and proper word to describe the human race.  This chapter borrows heavily from John Paul II’s The Theology of the Body.
  • Read a new essay I have just written called “Why I Do Not Use Gender-Neutral Language“.  The essay is composed of three parts: 1) a survey of how strong and ubiquitious the gender-neutral agenda has become; 2) an argument as to why the Bible (and hymns, prayers, creeds, etc.) should not be translated in accordance with the “rules” of “non-sexist” usage; 3) an argument as to why the gender-neutral trend in general is a negative and even potentially harmful one.
  • Rehabilitating Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis: This essay, written to present at Oxbridge 2005, takes aim at the growing Cult of the Ugly and calls for a return to standards of goodness, truth, and beauty–in doing so, it enlists the aid of all three parts of The Space Trilogy, all seven Chronicles of Narnia, and Till We Have Faces.
  • Screwtape’s Millennial Toast: An updating of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Proposes a Toast, this satirical essays exposes what Satan’s main temptation tactics have been since the 1960′s.
  • The Threefold Witness of the Church: The Catholic Peter, the Orthodox John, and the Protestant Paul: In this essay, I argue that Christians are in need of a metaphor by which they can envision the three main branches of Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant) as various members making up a Univeral Body, and then go on to find that metaphor in the threefold witness of the “inner circle” of Apostles: Peter, John, and Paul (whom I posit as taking the place of James in Acts).
  • Satan’s Greatest Secret: Taken from the Second Movement of my book, Life to the Full, this essay attempts to demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion, Satan (not Christ) is the one who desires to steal our personality, make us into mindless automatons, and prevent us from growing toward our full potential.
  • In Defense of Gifts: Condensed from my book, Life to the Full, this essay argues that a full use of our secular gifts can actually draw us closer to God and even prepare us somewhat for heaven.
  • The Heirs of Galileo: Published in the December 2002 issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity (http://www.touchstonemag.com), this takes up the evolution/ creation debate from a fresh perspective and defends Intelligent Design theory.
  • What Christianity is Not: A work of apologetics that tries to arrive at what Christianity IS by contrasting it from what it is NOT: a religion, a philosophy, a myth, or a culture.
  • Myth Matters: C. S. Lewis bequeathed us a method and a language for sharing the gospel with the modern and postmodern world: first published in Christianity Today, April 23, 2001.  To read this essay online, please visit the website of CT (www.christianitytoday.com) and search by my last name.
  • The Only Complete Truth: Another work of apologetics that posits Christianity as the fulfillment of all the highest yearnings of the pagan world.  Scheduled to be published soon in Sacred Tribes.
  • Not a Pretty World: The Historical Origins, Cinematic Conventions, and Psychological Landscapes of Film Noir.  Click the link to download a brief essay presentation on film noir that I gave at the Cornerstone Festival in the Summer of 2005; included as well are two filmographies on German Expressionism and film noir and a list of film noir elements that appear in the Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon.

Essays Dealing with Christian Education and Educators

  • Christ in the Classroom: After summing up the growth in Christian colleges and establishing the need for the integration of faith and learning, I then go on to say that Evangelicals often have a hard time doing so because when they think faith they immediately think Atonement, and the Cross is not an easy doctrine to integrate with academic disciplines. I then suggest as a counter method that Evangelicals look instead to the Incarnation as a doctrine that DOES have clear and far-reaching implications for the way academic disciplines are approached and taught. I then discuss briefly the theological/philosophical richness of the Incarnation and then proceed to show how this richness can impact the way we handle 8 separate disciplines: English, Communications, Art, and History (from the Humanities), and biology, physics, psychology, and anthropology (from the natural and social sciences).
  • Read my essay titled Why I Do Not Use Gender-Neutral Language.  The essay is composed of three parts: 1) a survey of how strong and ubiquitious the gender-neutral agenda has become; 2) an argument as to why the Bible (and hymns, prayers, creeds, etc.) should not be translated in accordance with the “rules” of “non-sexist” usage; 3) an argument as to why the gender-neutral trend in general is a negative and even potentially harmful one.
  • Reclaiming the Bible as Literature: Taken from the prologue to Seeing the Kingdom, this essay explains why Evangelicals are often suspicious of literary analyses of the Bible and why they shouldn’t be.
  • Notes Toward a Humanist Christian University: Taken from Chapters 8 and 9 of Confessions of a Humanist Christian, this essay considers what a university that was true both to its Christian and humanistic heritage would look like: it answers the question (both theoretically and practically) of how a University might be built where the two streams from Jerusalem and Athens can meet and flow together.
  • Christian Higher Education: An essay targeted to Christian teachers that explains what a Christian liberal-arts university should strive to teach its students.
  • The Dangers of a Values-Free Education: Taking C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man as its starting point, this essay discusses what happens when set moral and ethical standards (based on the Bible) are removed from our schools.
  • Apologist for the Past: The Medieval Vision of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Chronicles of Narnia: first published in Mythlore 88, Spring, 2001 (volume 3, no. 2).
  • Reading List of Books that I believe are essential to one who, like myself, is both a Christian and a Humanist.
  • Download a series of 6 outlines covering various aspects of Christian Higher Education.  The first two outlines (in paragraph form) discuss what C. S. Lewis can teach modern Christian educators and offer advice on how to integrate the doctrine of the Incarnation into various disciplines.