Events

Featured Event

organized by the davenant institute

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 2023 | THE CAPITAL HILTON, WASHINGTON, DC

At this award banquet, which we intend to be an annual event, the Davenant Institute is pleased to honor Dr. Carl R. Trueman with our first-ever C.S. Lewis Award for Christian Wisdom, in recognition of his crucial recent work on “expressive individualism” and the challenge it poses for classical and Christian understandings of the human person and political order.

C.S. (“Jack”) Lewis (1898-1963) taught English literature at Oxford University (Magdalen College, 1925–1954) and was chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University (Magdalene College, 1954–1963). He rose to prominence through his work as an apologist, devotional writer, and later children’s fiction author. He wrote over forty books including Mere Christianity, Miracles, Till We Have Faces, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Ransom Trilogy. As a powerful Protestant scholar and public intellectual who combined deep insight, historical perspective, and resolute orthodoxy with winsome, articulate, and persuasive presentations of Christian truth before a watching world, C.S. Lewis embodies the Davenant Institute’s vision of Christian humanism.

As Davenant seeks to RETRIEVE THE RICHES OF CLASSICAL PROTESTANTISM TO RENEW AND BUILD UP THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, we want to honor those who, following in Lewis’s footsteps, courageously confront the weighty intellectual challenges facing modern Christians. The C.S. Lewis Award for Christian Wisdom, accordingly, will be given each year to a Christian scholar or public intellectual who has made a signal recent contribution to Protestant faith and thought by demonstrating (1) broad historical perspective, (2) wise insight into contemporary challenges, and (3) persuasive and irenic articulation of much-needed truths.