Hillsdale College has Michael Ward in orbit.
Like a comet, the 2015 commencement speaker returns to Hillsdale from Oxford and will speak at 7 p.m. tonight in Phillips Auditorium. The interdisciplinary talk, sponsored by the history department, is titled, “Great Balls of Fire: C.S. Lewis, Narnia, and Medieval Cosmology.” The Anglican minister is the author of “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis.”
Mark Kalthoff, chair of the history department, said he hopes Ward’s talk will draw an audience as diverse as its content.
“I think one of the ideals of a liberal arts college is that it’s a community of inquiry that looks for connections between disciplines,” Kalthoff said, “and in this case, although he is formally trained in literature and theology, there is stuff in C.S. Lewis and his work that involves history and particularly history of medieval and renaissance science and cosmology. So I’m hoping that some of the folks in sciences will turn out as well as folks in literature and history, so we’ll see.”
Ward’s talk is part of a number of engagements in the United States, including taping a few lectures for Hillsdale’s online courses.