inkling·sAbout inkling·s
in·kling \ˈiŋ-kliŋ\ · noun
a slight knowledge or vague notion; a hint of something you can’t yet fully see.
from Middle English inclen, to hint.
inkling-s · a place for following them.
inkling-s is where I follow small things — a word, a passage, a painting, an ordinary ache — to see where they lead.
Followed far enough, they lead to Christ, to a place that somehow you know is home.
Who I am
Saved by grace. Husband, Dad, son, brother and friend. Unceasingly curious. Still learning to see God in all things.
I’m a seminary dropout who has spent a career investing in and running private companies. I try to be a mile wide and am therefore forced to be an inch deep: sports, cooking, politics, photography, music, fiction, distance running, and seeing God’s beauty in all of them. Originally from Baltimore, now living in New York with my wife and our three young kids.
The Inklings
The Inklings were a discussion group, of sorts, active during the 1930s and 1940s. They were literary enthusiasts who, together, praised the transformative power of narrative in fiction. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams were among the most notable participants. Often over beers at the Eagle and Child, they talked about life and reviewed each others’ work. During this period, the Inklings wrote some of the most beloved fantasy novels of all time, The Lord of the Rings and Narnia Tales among them.
As the Inklings took their literary journey together, friendship between them grew. But that wasn’t all. God was also using their friendships to indelibly change them as people.
A skeptic of the Christian faith throughout his youth, Lewis later came to believe in Jesus – in part through his realization that the Gospel is the true fairy tale to which all other fairy tales point. He came to see God as the ultimate Prince who saves the slumbering princess from an evil spell, as it were. This likely animated his claim that “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” It was his dear friend Tolkien, a Catholic since boyhood, who pressed him on this exact point late one night in 1931. Within days, Lewis believed. There is no more indelible decision than that.
On friendship with Lewis, Tolkien generously wrote:
Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual — a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher — and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage of Our Lord.
C. S. Lewis more humorously wrote of Tolkien:
No one ever influenced Tolkien — you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.
It’s my hope that these writings, my inkling-s so to speak, can spark conversations fractionally as rich as those the Inklings no doubt shared. I would like that we could all be honest, brave, intellectuals–scholars, poets and philosophers. If we can’t achieve that, maybe our posture in discussion can at least be better than that of bandersnatches.
Debts
Almost none of the ideas here are original to me. What is mine is the seeing. I notice something, a word, a picture, a moment in an ordinary week, and then I synthesize, setting it beside the thinking of people far smarter than I am until it shows what it means. In that sense I stand on the shoulders of giants. The ideas are mostly theirs. The experiences, and the joy in them, are mine, and that is what I want to share: not just what I have seen, but the seeing.
The largest debt by some distance is to Tim Keller. The habit of going after the heart rather than the behaviour, of looking for the idol underneath the sin, of reading every text toward Christ without forcing it — that is his, and I learned it from him, over twenty years in the pews of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. A good deal of what I notice, I notice because he taught me where to look. Where I quote him, I say so and link the sermon. But his influence goes far beyond the footnotes.
Behind him, and often behind him in my thinking too: John Stott on the cross and the evangelical spine of the thing. Derek Kidner, who governs how I read the wisdom books and is simply better on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes than anyone I know. Geerhardus Vos and Edmund Clowney for the conviction that Christ is on every page and the discipline to find him there honestly. Augustine, Calvin and Bavinck for the doctrinal spine. And C. S. Lewis, whose fingerprints are on the name of this place.
They are teachers, not authorities. Where any of them and Scripture part company, Scripture governs, and I have tried to say so when it happens. But the ideas are theirs far more often than they are mine, and the honest thing is to put their names where you can see them.
Pass it on
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