Homecoming at the Wade | How to Read like C.S. Lewis: Lessons from the Lewis Library

The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College presents "Homecoming at the Wade | How to Read like C.S. Lewis: Lessons from the Lewis Library," a lecture by Jim Beitler, Ph.D., Director of the Wade Center on Friday, October 2, 2026, at 1:00 PM.

The Wade Center is home to over 2,500 books from C.S. Lewis’s personal library. This talk explores what Lewis’s library reveals about how to read well and—in the spirit of Alan Jacobs’s Breaking Bread with the Dead, Wheaton College’s 2026-27 Core Book—how to cultivate “a more tranquil mind.”

James E. Beitler (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is the Director of the Wade Center, the Marion E. Wade Chair of Christian Thought, and a Professor of English. His scholarship focuses on the rhetoric of Christian witness and writing as a spiritual activity, looking to C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Desmond Tutu, and other exemplary communicators as guides for faithful practice. He is the author of Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church; Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words (with co-author Richard Hughes Gibson); and Remaking Transitional Justice in the United States. He is currently working on the collection Sites of Writing: Essays in Honor of Anne Ruggles Gere (with co-editor Sarah Ruffing Robbins) as well as a book project based on archival research conducted at the Wade Center. Beitler has taught a variety of courses at Wheaton, including Christianity and Fantasy, Lewis and Tolkien, Tolkien and Environmental Stewardship (co-taught with Kristen Page), Teaching Writing, Writing Chicago, Persuasive Writing, and First-Year Writing. He also teaches a course in the Wheaton College Summer Institute—the Makings of Middle-earth. He lives in Wheaton with his wife, Brita, and their boys, James and Arne.

This event is free and open to the public and will take place in Marion E. Wade Center, Room 130 Bakke Auditorium, located at 351 East Lincoln Avenue in Wheaton on the northwest corner of campus at the intersection of Washington Street and Lincoln Avenue. Parking is located on the east side of Washington Street. For more information, contact the Wade Center at 630.752.5908 or wade@wheaton.edu.