Michael Ward is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hillsdale College. Described by Professor N.T. Wright in The Times Literary Supplement as “the foremost living Lewis scholar,” Dr. Ward is the author of the best-selling and award-winning Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press), co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press), and presenter of the BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death, Dr. Ward unveiled a permanent national memorial to him in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, London. He has a keen interest in cinema, co-authoring Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List (Word on Fire, 2023), playing the role of Vicar in the film The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis, and handing a pair of X-ray spectacles to Agent 007 in the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough. In real life Ward is a Catholic priest, assisting at Holy Rood Church, Oxford, alongside his work as an academic. Website: www.michaelward.net.
Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Ward:
The Heav’ns and All the Powers Therein — Michael Ward makes a compelling case that the qualities attributed to the seven planets in the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages are embodied in C. S. Lewis's seven books about Narnia. (68 minutes)
The Heav’ns and All the Powers Therein — In this extended interview, Michael Ward makes a compelling case that the qualities attributed to the seven planets in the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages are embodied in C. S. Lewis’s seven books about Narnia. (68 minutes)
Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)
Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Word on Fire Academic, 2021)
Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (OUP, 2008)
The Narnia Code: C.S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens (Tyndale, 2010)
Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List (Word on Fire, 2023), co-author with David Paul Baird and Andrew Petiprin
C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner (Wipf & Stock, 2016), editor, with Peter S. Williams
The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (CUP, 2010), editor, with Robert MacSwain
Heresies and How to Avoid Them (SPCK, 2007), editor, with Ben Quash
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Conversations from 2020
Every volume of the Journal produced since November 1999 (Volume 40) is now available to members in our catalog, and on the first Friday of each month, we will highlight one of these archived collections of interviews. The entire highlighted volume will be available for one month to members and to anyone who signs up for a free Visitor’s Pass.*
Volume 146 of the Journal, produced in February 2020, is this month’s free sample volume. In this Friday Feature you will hear excerpts from interviews with Mark Mitchell about why the modern denigration of tradition has rendered political life so volatile; with Hans Boersma about how the ultimate end of seeing God should inform how we live now; with Henry Edmondson, III, about political ideas in Flannery O’Connor’s work; with Brian Clayton and Douglas Kries about integrating faith and reason; with Conor Sweeney about wrestling with the ‘death of God’ with the help of hobbit wisdom; and with Carole Vanderhoof about Dorothy L. Sayers.
*Follow the instructions on our “Listen for free” page to sign up for a free Visitor’s Pass. With this Pass, you can download these audio files to our app on your mobile device. NB: We don’t sell or share our listeners’ information with anyone else. No one who signs up for any of our memberships, free or paid, need fear that their contact information will be sold or shared with any other entity.
Antón Barba-Kay on the shape of the virtues in the digital age
What virtues do we need to live well in our digital age, and how might those virtues be best formed, not only individually but as communities? In this March 2026 lecture, Antón Barba-Kay examines the notion of virtue ethics, a concept that has become increasingly alien to many. He then discusses how digital technology actively deforms, disassociates, and disembeds our lives and experiences. Barba-Kay proposes key principles that educational institutions can embody in order to help form virtuous human beings and communities in light of what we are; and he articulates three “interlocking” virtues that relate to those principles. Throughout the lecture, he offers reflections on these issues from his teaching experience at Deep Springs College, a unique school that forms students through academics, self-government, and manual labor.
