President’s Distinguished Scholar Lecture 2019: “C.S. Lewis’s Christian Imagination”

Palm Beach Atlantic University hosts its annual President’s Distinguished Scholar Lecture in October with Dr. Michael Ward, senior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford.
Ward’s lecture titled, “C.S. Lewis’s Christian Imagination,” is free and open to the public 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 7, in the University’s DeSantis Family Chapel, 300 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Ward is the author of the award-winning Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press).
Though based at Blackfriars in Oxford, Ward is employed as professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Texas, teaching one course per semester as part of the online Master of Arts program in Christian apologetics.
On the 50th of Lewis’s death on November 22, 2013, Ward unveiled a permanent national memorial to him in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. He is the co-editor of a volume of commemorative essays marking the anniversary, entitled C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner (2016).
Ward presented the BBC1 television documentary, The Narnia Code (2009), directed and produced by the BAFTA-winning film-maker Norman Stone. He authored an accompanying book entitled The Narnia Code: C.S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens (Tyndale House, USA / Paternoster, UK).
Ward served as chaplain of St. Peter’s College in the University of Oxford from 2009 to 2012 and as chaplain of Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge between 2004 and 2007. He was resident warden of The Kilns, Lewis’s Oxford home, from 1996 to 1999.
He studied English at Oxford and theology at Cambridge. He earned a Ph.D. in divinity from St. Andrews.