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“Have You Ever Wondered?” has launched in the UK, Canada, and the USA

It’s out now! Have You Ever Wondered? is a gentle, engaging book that helps our friends begin to ask spiritual questions by starting with the things they already care about or are intrigued by: from beauty to justice, science to suffering, art to music to films.
Right now, our friends at 10ofthose.com have an AMAZING offer on. You can buy a copy of the book and they’ll send you a second copy TOTALLY FREE. That means you can keep one yourself, and give one away! (Or if you’re really keen and want to reach more friends, you can give both copies away).
If you live in Canada, you can order it via our friends at Apologetics Canada.
If you live in the USA, you can order it via 10ofThose USA.

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Fire on the Mountain

The path through the trees was narrow and overgrown, meandering its way through birch, oak and elm, climbing gently as it wound its way up from the valley. A few minutes walking brought me to the ancient moss-laden wall that surrounded the forest, from which a wooden gate led out on the hillside. From there the track quickly steepened as it wound sinuously up toward the mountaintop. I paused every so often to catch my breath, turning to watch the cloud shadows chase one another across the flanks of the hills on the far side of the valley.

Onwards and upwards I climbed, as the first hints of dusk began to take hold and the shadows grew longer. I gained the summit ridge just as the westering sun was beginning to sink behind a bank of clouds hanging over the distant Langdale Pikes, among the most well known of Lakeland’s hills and loved by the poets, by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.[1]

Suddenly, as the sun dropped completely behind the cloudbank, the whole sky turned the colour of burnished gold and the clouds themselves lit up as if on fire, a maelstrom of red, orange and ochre, with the occasional flash of silver. At that moment, through a gap in the clouds poured a great ray of sunshine, streaming into the valley below like a searchlight and throwing into stark relief the lines of fields, lanes and hedgerows.

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Have You Ever Wondered?

Beauty. Justice. Identity. Love. Stories. Nature. Hope. These things intrigue us, move us and prompt us to ask big questions. Could there be clues in our deepest desires that point to life’s meaning?

Have You Ever Wondered? Finding the Everyday Clues to Meaning, Purpose and Spirituality is a fun, readable, and accessible book designed to gently start spiritual conversations. It’s one of the most exciting books it’s been my privilege to be involved with!


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Richard Dawkins: Running Away from the Debate?

The New Atheism, the insanely popular movement that in the 2000s made celebrities of many atheists, has all but collapsed. Christopher Hitchens is dead. Sam Harris has become a figure of fun. Daniel Dennett has retreated behind his beard and his study door. Lesser-known figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali now claim they’re Christian. And then there’s Richard Dawkins.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: A Most Unlikely Convert?

A few weekends ago I was with friends in Oxford and we took a wander along Addison’s Walk, a pretty tree-lined footpath that rambles beside the River Cherwell. It’s a walk steeped in spiritual history for it was on an evening stroll here in 1931 that C. S. Lewis had a deep conversation with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson which helped him take a massive leap forward toward Christianity.

Lewis had become a believer in god two years earlier, after a decades-long journey from atheism. He had been driven in part by the realisation that all that he loved—art, music, beauty, culture, truth—made no sense on atheism. A growing realisation that he wasn’t so much seeking god as being pursued, led to the dramatic moment:

In the Trinity term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most reluctant convert in all England.[1]

It shows how much Christians have canonised St. Lewis of Oxford that we often quote that story with excitement (“Look how the great atheist fell!”) without appreciating that Lewis’s initial conversion is a bit insipid. It took the later conversation with Tolkien and Dyson to help complete his spiritual journey. Lewis wrote:

I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity … My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.[2]

I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s unconventional and circuitous road to faith when I read with shock the recent announcement that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a Christian.[3] If you’re unaware of Ali, she is a public intellectual, author and women’s right’s activist, but also famous as a fiery atheist, former Muslim and later fierce critic of Islam, her criticism driven by the hatred and violence she had seen both in her first-hand experiences as well in as Islam’s core texts.[4]

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How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot

How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot
A Panic-Free Guide to Having Natural Conversations about Your Faith

Learn how to have natural conversations with your friends and family about your faith. Discover four key questions that invite people into engaging discussions about what matters most in life.

How to Talk about Jesus without Looking like an Idiot explores why you don’t need to be afraid or uncomfortable, the four questions that help people open up, the five steps to respond to tough questions, and how to effortlessly bring faith into a conversation. It doesn’t need to be awkward. Everyday conversations that open the door to evangelism can be painless and natural. Let me help you find easy ways to talk about the true meaning of life and learn how to share the gospel with your neighbours, friends, and family.

The book is now available in the USA and Canada; it launches in the UK on 8 August. You can order (or pre-order) it below or if you support Solas, the evangelism organisation I lead, we’ll send you a free copy as a gift! (So if you’re in the UK, you don’t have to wait until August!) If you’re not already a Solas supporter, sign up today and we can send you a free copy as a thank you — again, ahead of the release date!  You can also read a free sample.

USA:

Canada:

UK (pre-order, release date 8 August 2023):

Australia (pre-order):

Read a Free Sample!

Download chapter 1 (and the table of contents and foreword by Lee Strobel) as a PDF.

Audio Book

I’m delighted that How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot is also available as an audiobook (narrated by me!):

E-Book

You can also read How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot as an e-book:

 

 

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Far More Than Fantasy: The Enduring Appeal of The Lord of the Rings

Twenty years on, I can still remember the palpable sense of excitement as we sat in the packed cinema, the house lights dimmed, and the title card for The Fellowship of the Ring appeared on the screen. A cheer arose from the wildly enthusiastic audience (who had queued for several hours to get into this first screening) as the words of Galadriel (played by Cate Blanchett) solemnly intoned: “The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.”[1]

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For What It’s Worth

A Reflection on the Question of Human Value

A couple of years ago, some good friends of ours suffered a devastating house fire. They woke at 3am to the smell of smoke, discovered a kitchen blaze that had already spread to the lounge and the hall, and so they grabbed their kids, the cat, two guinea pigs, and (at the insistence of their six-year-old) a glass tank containing three stick insects, and fled to the safety of a neighbour’s house, from where they called the fire brigade. By the time two fire tenders had arrived, sirens screaming and lights flashing, it was too late—the fire had taken hold and although the hoses dosed the flames, almost everything was destroyed. “We lost virtually every possession,” our friends said afterwards, “but at least nobody was hurt. Not even a stick insect was left behind.”

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Monarchs, Mortality, and Meaning

On Monday 19th September I gathered with a small group of family and friends to watch the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. We were not alone—almost four billion people globally watched the service from Westminster Abbey.

I found the funeral profoundly moving but although there was sadness, the service was not in the slightest way depressing, for the Queen’s funeral was deeply and thoroughly Christian, saturated throughout with a message of joy and hope, the good news that for the follower of Jesus, death is not the end. As the final hymn that the Queen herself had chosen proclaimed:

Finish then thy new creation,
pure and spotless let us be;
let us see thy great salvation,
perfectly restored in thee,
changed from glory into glory
till in heaven we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee,
lost in wonder, love, and praise!

Existential Despair?

But not everybody was so impressed by that message of hope in the face of death. Whilst the funeral was still in progress, journalist and broadcaster Ian Dunt tweeted:

Not everybody was so impressed by that message of hope in the face of death. Whilst the funeral was still in progress, journalist and broadcaster Ian Dunt tweeted: