2024 Fuller Events

"THE MAJOR & THE MISSIONARY: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs"

Thursday, October 3, 2024 @ 7pm, Armerding Recital Hall

The Marion E. Wade Center and Wheaton College Arena Theater present, "THE MAJOR & THE MISSIONARY," a staged reading by Mark Lewis and Kailey Bell of a play by Inklings scholar Diana Pavlac Glyer, based on her recent book, The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs. A talkback will follow the performance.

“After the death of his brother, Warren Lewis lived at The Kilns in Oxford, edited his famous brother’s letters, and did a little writing of his own. Then he got a letter from a stranger on the far side of the world. Over the years that followed he and Blanche Biggs, a missionary in Papua New Guinea, shared a vibrant correspondence. These conversations encompassed their views on faith, their politics, their humor, the legacy of C.S. Lewis, and their own trials and longings. Their letters paint a colorful portrait that illuminates not only the particulars of distant times and places, but the intimate contours of a rare friendship.” -From The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs (2023)

A recording of the event is available for on-site viewing at the Wade Center.

Join us after the event for a book signing with Diana Pavlac Glyer! The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs is available for purchase at the Wade bookshop.

 

Diana Pavlac Glyer is an internationally recognized speaker and teacher whose work always circles back to collaboration, creativity, and community. She is a professor in the Honors College at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California where she teaches literature, history, theology, and philosophy in an integrated Great Books curriculum. Dr. Glyer is also an award-winning writer whose research focuses on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings. Her book The Company They Keep (2008) offers an in-depth account of Lewis and Tolkien and their writing process. It shows how encouragement, praise, criticism, and conflict shaped their fellowship and their books.

This event is free and open to the public and will take place in Armerding Center for Music and the Arts, Room 132 Recital Hall, located at 520 East Kenilworth Avenue in Wheaton. For more information, contact Wade Center at 630.752.5908 or wade@wheaton.edu.

 

"An Evening with G. K. Chesterton: Apostle of Joy" with John Walker

June 26, 2024

The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College and Wheaton College Summer Institute presented "An Evening with G.K. Chesterton: Apostle of Joy," a one man play, written by and starring John Walker.

Join John Walker in his portrayal of G.K. Chesterton, prolific Christian writer, poet and ambassador of the faith on a journey through the afterlife where he recounts his life with wonder and gratitude while unpacking the golden key to his love of Christ. This one-man stage play introduces G.K. Chesterton in a supernatural setting as he travels through the afterlife unpacking the journey of his faith with his ever-present wit and paradoxical wisdom.

John Walker is a Professor of at Franciscan University and an award-winning actor who has performed in theatre, TV and film from London to Hollywood. He began performing Chesterton on EWTN where his series Chesterton Station is still in production.

• WATCH THE WALKER EVENT

 

"When A Heart Is Really Alive: George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination" a lecture by Malcolm Guite

May 30, 2024

This lecture explores how MacDonald's fantasy writing not only created a new literary genre and inspired writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but also how the living, numinous, symbols and stories he created continue to speak powerfully and prophetically into our own cultural crisis, two hundred years after he was born.

Malcolm Guite is a poet and priest, and Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He lives in Norfolk, England, and lectures widely in England and North America on Theology and Literature. His books include: Sounding the Seasons; Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury Press 2012), The Singing Bowl; Collected Poems (Canterbury Press 2013), Parable and Paradox (Canterbury Press 2016), Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder 2017), After Prayer (Canterbury Press 2019), The Word Within the Words (DLT 2021), and Lifting The Veil (Canterbury Press 2022). In 2023 he was awarded the Archbishop Lanfranc Medal for Education and Scholarship by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He also has a YouTube series called ‘A Spell in the Library.’

The event was sponsored by the Marion E. Wade Center’s Muriel Fuller Endowment for the Imagination and the Arts and is part of the "George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination" Bicentennial Conference with the George MacDonald Society.

• WATCH THE GUITE LECTURE
• LECTURE HANDOUT OF QUOTES