As a child our family loved watching The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights on our small black and white television. We were content — until the Sunday we first saw the fireworks bursting around the Disney castle in a cacophony of color on our grandmother’s new color TV. Suddenly our old black and white screen didn’t have the same appeal or possibilities. I still like to watch some movies in black and white like, It’s a Wonderful Life, for nostalgia’s sake, but in general I am now grateful for the world of color. As we have moved from the print version of Knowing & Doing to our new digital-only version, I have some nostalgia for the hard copy editions, yet I am excited about the new colors and visual enhancements we will be able to make now that we are no longer subject to 32 pages of black, white and red ink.

Our team has developed a beautiful new layout and design for Knowing & Doing that allows us to incorporate video, audio, and text links to articles. This will allow the reader to delve into other treasures and information on particular themes or stories.
We have also added some exciting new features that I believe you will enjoy. The first is a new interactive online book club that will enable you to interact with other readers around great books, ideas and authors. We are calling this new feature, “A Book Observed: An Online ‘Old Book’ Club”. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”¹ Thus we will highlight great books from the past that have the potential to give you a new vision of the world in which we live.

Our first featured old book is Jonathan Edwards’s fascinating book, Religious Affections. I encourage you to pick up a copy and join others in considering the outward signs of a godly inner life. Information about the online book club can be found Here.

A second feature will be an excerpt from A Powerful Sermon from One of the World’s Greatest Preachers. Our first featured sermon is from the “Golden-tongued” preacher himself from the 4th century, John Chrysostom. His call to reading the Bible on your own is as fresh as if it were preached last Sunday. You will find these timeless lessons from godly preachers of the past to be enriching.

Our readers have also requested that we provide them with more short, inspirational pieces and so we will include A Prayer, Poem or Psalm that you can easily share with friends and family. Christians through the ages have provided the world with some of the best poetry and songs of all time. We believe that you’ll find this first installment, a poem from the Reformed pastor, Richard Baxter, to be powerful and uplifting.

And finally, in an effort to help these articles shape both your heart and mind, we will be providing the reader with questions for each article to encourage engagement and spiritual growth. These questions could turn Knowing & Doing into a small group study as you could start a Knowing & Doing study group. Note that you can easily print the PDF copy of each article for reading and sharing.

Our hope and prayer at the C.S. Lewis Institute is that you find this new colorful, digital format and these exciting new features will help you to develop into a more faithful and fruitful disciple of Jesus Christ. We welcome your comments on additional enhancements.

May the Lord bless you as you dive into this Fall edition of Knowing and Doing.

Notes: 1 C.S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 201-202.