Monday, September 5, 2016

Remembering C. S. Lewis scholar Dr. Bruce L. Edwards

Dr. Bruce Edwards at a C S Lewis seminar
 at The Little Church in the Vale in Ohio in 2012
Photo by Mark Sommer, October 2012
I was reminded today that Bruce Edwards would have been 64 today. We lost this C. S. Lewis scholar way too early last October. Shortly after his death, I wrote this piece for Examiner.com. 

C. S. Lewis scholar Dr. Bruce L. Edwards passes away

Dr. Bruce L. Edwards Jr., well-known C. S. Lewis scholar and author, passed away last Wednesday in Willow, Alaska. He served on the faculty and in various administrative positions at Bowling Green State University in Ohio from 1981 until his retirement to Alaska in 2013. News of Edwards' death had been kept mainly to family and friends until an obituary surfaced on the Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune website Tuesday. The obituary was also published on Legacy.com. Monday the Bowling Green State University website posted an announcement about the Memorial service, which will be at Bowling Green Covenant Church Thursday.

Edwards served as the general editor of the 2007 four-volume scholarly work, "C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy" from Praeger Perspectives. In conjunction with the release of the first Chronicles of Narnia move, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," in 2005, Edwards published two Narnia-related books that same year: "Not a Tame Lion," and "Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Previously he had released two other Lewis-related volumes: "A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy" (1986), and "The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer" (1988).

Dr. Edwards also lectured frequently on C. S. Lewis at various locations throughout the country, and maintained the C. S. Lewis Review website (under various names) for about twenty years. According to the About page, the website "is an online journal designed to stimulate reflections on the life, work, and influence of Clive Staples Lewis, and other Christian writers and thinkers who represent significant linkages to the tradition Lewis exemplified of Christian scholarship and imaginative writing."

While Edwards may have "retired" in 2013, his love for teaching about C. S. Lewis continued. A video of an Introduction to an eight week course, which can be viewed on YouTube, gives a glimpse of his personality and his love for his topic. There will be no more videos from Alaska like this, but Lewis enthusiasts are grateful Edwards' legacy will live on through his books, audio and video recordings, and those he taught and influenced.

As Narnians would say, "Further up and further in," Bruce.

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