GAYNE ANACKER is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at California Baptist University, Riverside, California. He also currently serves as Vice President of the C.S. Lewis Foundation, Redlands, California. In an earlier life, he was founding President of Community Christian College, also based in Redlands, California. His intellectual interests include ethics, Great Books, intellectual history, and philosophy of religion. He is still waiting for his invitation to join the crew of the Dawn Treader.
GREGORY BASSHAM is Chief Duffer of the Philosophy Department at King’s College, Pennsylvania. A frequent contributor to the Popular Culture and Philosophy series, he is the co-editor of The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy (2003) and co-author of Critical Thinking: A Student’s Introduction (second edition, 2005). He had to get to know some devilishly queer people to get where he is today.
DEVIN BROWN is Professor of English at Asbury College, where among other things he teaches a class on Lewis and Tolkien. He is the author of Inside Narnia: A Guide to Exploring The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) and a novel for young people titled Not Exactly Normal (2005). He is looking for a wardrobe that opens on a land where it’s always Christmas and never winter.
TIMOTHY CLEVELAND is an Associate Professor and Tisroc of the Philosophy Department at New Mexico State University. He is the author of Trying Without Willing: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1997) as well as articles on the philosophy of action, philosophy of logic, and metaphysics. He is still looking for a magician to remove his uglifying spell.
JANICE DAURIO is Professor of Philosophy at Moorpark College. Her philosophical interests include ethics and the philosophy of religion, and her literary interests run from C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. She has published articles in History of Philosophy Quarterly, Philosophers Annual, and Downside Review. Her sister and three brothers were startled to learn that if the White Witch had served her cappuccino, as she served Turkish Delight to Edmund, she too might have betrayed her siblings to the Witch.
BILL DAVIS is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Covenant College. He is the author of “Choosing to Die: The Gift of Mortality in Middle-earth” in The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, as well as chapters on moral philosophy in Introduction to Ethics (2000) and on philosophical theology in Reason for the Hope Within (1999) and Beyond the Bounds (2003). He is still having his dragon skin torn off.
KARIN FRY is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Her research interests include continental philosophy, aesthetics, social and political philosophy, and feminism. Though technically a daughter of Eve, she prefers to think of herself as a daughter of Lilith.
LAURA GARCIA teaches Philosophy at Boston College, specializing in philosophy of religion and metaphysics. She also writes on sex, marriage, and personalist feminism, taking the radical view that the three are compatible and mutually reinforcing. Her favorite C.S. Lewis books are The Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce (which isn’t about divorce).
WENDY C. HAMBLET is a Canadian philosopher who teaches Philosophy at Adelphi University, where her research focuses upon the problems of peaceful engagement within and among human communities, especially communities that have suffered histories of radical victimization. She is the author of The Sacred Monstrous: A Reflection on Violence in Human Communities (2004) and Savage Constructions: A Theory of Rebounding Violence in Africa (2005), as well as a number of articles in professional journals. Hers is a high and lonely destiny but somebody’s gotta fulfill it.
KEVIN KINGHORN follows daily in the footsteps of C.S. Lewis. But this is not because Kevin is a literary genius. He simply lives in Oxford and happens to pass many of Lewis’s old haunts on the way to work everyday at Oxford University, where Kevin took his doctorate and now teaches. Kevin frequently gives “C.S. Lewis tours” to family and close friends visiting Oxford—at what he describes as very reasonable rates. Kevin also contributed a chapter to Superheroes and Philosophy. He holds office hours without appointments only between nine and ten p.m. the second Saturday each month.
STEVE LOVELL completed his doctoral thesis, Philosophical Themes from C.S. Lewis, at the University of Sheffield, England. Having tried his hand as a mathematics teacher he still wonders, with Professor Kirke, “What do they teach them at these schools?”
GARETH B. MATTHEWS is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is the author of a number of books and articles on ancient and medieval philosophy, including Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy (1999) and Augustine (2005). He has written extensively on philosophy and children, including The Philosophy of Childhood (1994) and he writes a regular column on children’s stories for the journal, Thinking. For a hobby he collects and refinishes antique furniture. He has a special interest in old wardrobes.
ANGUS MENUGE is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University Wisconsin, and Associate Director of the Cranach Institute (www.cranach.org). Dr. Menuge has edited three books, including C.S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands (1997), and is the author of Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (2004). As a reminder of his former career as a lumberjack, he wears a special kind of underclothes.
TIMOTHY MOSTELLER is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Biola University. He is the author of Relativism in Contemporary American Philosophy (2006), and is publishing philosophical articles in philosophy of religion and ethics. His students regularly interrupt his classes with chants of, “Keep it up, Doc! Keep it up! You’re talking like a book.”
ADAM PETERSON is Instructor of Philosophy at Asbury College. He earned the M.A. in 2005 from St. Louis University, which involved working closely with Eleonore Stump. His main philosophical interests are ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. As a child Adam read the Chronicles of Narnia with his father, and then he put aside fairy tales for a time. But he is now—just as Lewis predicted Lucy Barfield would do when she grew older—picking it up, dusting it off, and reading it afresh. Aslan appears even bigger to him today than he did years ago.
MICHAEL L. PETERSON is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of that department at Asbury College. He is author of Evil and the Christian God and With All Your Mind, and co-author of Reason and Religious Belief. He is editor of The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings and Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings and co-editor of Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion. Mike is General Editor of the Blackwell series “Exploring Philosophy of Religion” and Managing Editor of Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers. He has fond memories of reading the Chronicles with his son Adam many Narnian years ago, but now writing about it with Adam makes it seem as if no time at all has passed.
VICTOR REPPERT teaches philosophy and religion at Glendale Community College in Glendale, Arizona, and is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (2003). He frequently takes baths in asses’ milk.
BRUCE REICHENBACH is Professor of Philosophy at Augsburg College. He has written over fifty articles and book chapters on diverse topics in philosophy of religion, ethics, theology, and religion. His most recent books are Introduction to Critical Thinking (2001), On Behalf of God: A Christian Ethic for Biology (1995), and Reason and Religious Belief (third edition, 2003), co-authored with Michael Peterson, William Hasker, and David Basinger. “What is education? I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself, and he who will not pass through this curriculum is helped very little by the fact that he was born in a most enlightened age” (Kierkegaard).
THOMAS D. SENOR is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Arkansas. He has published papers on the philosophy of religion, theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy; he has also served on the Program Committee of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association and the Executive Committee of the Society of Christian Philosophers. Senor reports that in addition to clothes, his closets contain skeletons but are bereft of pathways to magical kingdoms.
JAMES F. SENNETT is Professor of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lincoln Christian College and Seminary in Lincoln, Illinois. He has written two books and edited two others, and has published over two dozen articles in professional and academic journals and books. His latest book is This Much I Know: A Postmodern Apologetic (2005). He never meant to be a magician.
CHARLES TALIAFERRO, Professor of Philosophy at St. Olaf College, has authored or edited seven books, most recently Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion since the Seventeenth Century (2005). He has written on C.S. Lewis in the Scottish Journal of Theology and in a short work on prayer, Praying with C.S. Lewis (1999). Like the Professor in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he is a devoted enthusiast for Plato.
RACHEL TRAUGHBER has studied philosophy and music at the Institute for the International Education of Students (Vienna) and at St. Olaf College. Raised in the Azores, when she is not performing or practicing music, she wishes she were exploring an archipelago of islands in the Dawn Treader.
JERRY L. WALLS is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, where he has taught since 1987. He had the good fortune to get to know Greg Bassham while they were graduate students together at Notre Dame. Among his books are Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (2002) and (with Scott Burson) C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer (1998). He would like to have lived in the happy peaceful centuries in Narnia when the only things that could be remembered were things like dances and tournaments. He assumes Notre Dame, Kentucky, and Texas Tech (or whoever was coached by the Narnian equivalent of Bobby Knight) won the Lion’s share of those tournaments.
STEPHEN H. WEBB is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Wabash College. He is the author of eight books, including American Providence (2004) and The Divine Voice (2004). He likes writing about sound in part because he is losing his hearing. His favorite C.S. Lewis book is Perelandra, which he loves to teach. When not writing, he is able to maintain a peaceful state of mind though surrounded by his wife, three children, and two barking dachshunds, simply by muting his hearing aids. He is currently working on a book about Bob Dylan, who sings like a lion, although perhaps not The Lion.
ERIK WIELENBERG is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at DePauw University. He is the author of Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (2005) as well as various articles in ethics and the philosophy of religion. He is currently working on a book on the views of C.S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell. Erik wants to warn readers that many succumb to the sickly sweet lure of philosophy, and few return to the sun-lit lands.