The Man Who Explained Suffering Until It Happened to Him

Theology Made Podcast · Oct 15, 2026 · 14m · transcript

In the autumn of 1960, C.S. Lewis went through a cupboard at The Kilns looking for something to write in. What he found were old school exercise books, a few pages already filled with something else. His wife had died in July.

Twenty years earlier he had published The Problem of Pain. It sold, and it kept selling, and it made him the man that grieving strangers wrote letters to. Sitting in that cold house with a schoolboy’s notebook on his knee, he could not find one sentence in it that did him any good.

This episode is about what happened in between. Joy Davidman, the Bronx-born ex-Communist…