When we first projected CHRISTIANITY TODAY, we made every effort to enlist C. S. Lewis as a fortnightly contributor. A mutual friend, an Anglican clergyman, motored from London to Oxford to present our confidential invitation. But the brilliant and refreshing lay apologist for Christianity (still unlisted in Encyclopaedia Britannica) had already decided to avoid direct theological engagement in order to “catch readers unawares” through fiction and symbol. Through the years, however, C. S. Lewis took friendly interest in this magazine, and once he wrote of the Christian Century that it would be “a pity to swell their sales!”
The search began, then, for a standing contributor to “Eutychus and His Kin,” as we named our letters section in an allusion to Acts 20:9, where a sleepy observer was miraculously awakened to life.
Eutychus I was an unheralded scribe whose gifts we recalled from college days. For 6½ years Edmund P. Clowney (now president of Westminster Theological Seminary) supplied our pages with a column that many readers turned to first when they received a new issue.
Eutychus II carried forward this difficult literary assignment with high skill and warm humor. But with this issue, Eutychus II (see page 40) closes his very readable series and passes along his gifted pen to an unnamed satirist.
