A Culture Warrior Goes Home for Christmas

Dr James Como, a C.S. Lewis scholar and valiant fighter in the Culture War, has died. May flights of angels lead him home, and may he rest in peace. Blessed Repose and Memory Eternal!

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

As an indomitable culture warrior and soldier of Christ, James Como died with his boots on, working in the Lewisian vineyard in which he had laboured for almost six decades.

“Having labored in the Lewisian vineyard for nearly six decades I rejoice in the vitality of the laborers now reaping the grapes of joy.” These words were written by the late James Como in a recent book review published in the St. Austin Review (StAR), the cultural journal of which I am honoured to be the editor. Over the years, he and I became good friends, though we only met once or twice, probably at meetings of the New York City C.S. Lewis Society of which, back in 1969, he had been a founding member. It was with great sadness, therefore, that I learned last week that he had died unexpectedly on November 24 from a sudden heart attack. At the time of his death, he was in Romania to speak at a C.S. Lewis conference, his globetrotting at the ripe old age of seventy-eight being indicative of his indefatigable spirit. James Como was not one to rest on his laurels or to put his feet up in restful and well-deserved retirement. As an indomitable culture warrior and soldier of Christ, he died with his boots on, working in the Lewisian vineyard in which, as he said, he had laboured for almost six decades.

For those who were not blessed to know Dr. Como, it would be well to offer a few basic biographical details. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus of rhetoric and public communication at the City University of New York (CUNY). He had joined the CUNY faculty in 1968, where he founded the university’s Speech Communication discipline (writing its curriculum and coordinating it for forty years). In addition, he was a professor in the Department of Performing and Fine Arts, chairing the department for many years, indicative of his love of literature as well as rhetoric.

Apart from writing regularly and frequently for the St. Austin Review, Dr. Como published in National Review, The New Criterion and in The Wilson Quarterly, among other venues. He wrote widely on rhetorical theory and literature and published collections of essays, short stories, poems and even a novel for children. He is best-known, however, as a scholar of C.S. Lewis. I own three of his five books on Lewis and was honoured to have been asked by each of the three publishers to offer endorsements. As these now serve as timely tributes to his life and legacy, I’m going to rekindle these words of praise for his fine work. Of Remembering C.S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him (Ignatius Press, 2005), I wrote that it was “an invaluable, indeed and indispensable, addition to the burgeoning sphere of Lewis scholarship”; of C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019), I wrote that “Como on Lewis is like Lewis on Christianity: He says so much in so few words. It is succinctness raised to an art form.” Finally, of Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C.S. Lewis and His Favorite Book (Winged Lion Press, 2022), I offered the following appraisal: “There are few living lovers of Lewis who know the great man’s work better than James Como. This being so, anything he writes on Lewis is worth reading. His latest book contends that the art of rhetoric and the art of storytelling meet sublimely in Perelandra.”

If knowing Dr. Como’s books is a blessing, knowing him personally was a veritable privilege. In recent years, he had become one of the most regular and reliable of book reviewers for the St. Austin Review. Surveying recent issues, I am reminded of his versatility and his omnivorous appetite for goodness, truth, and beauty. He wrote a review of a volume of verse by James Matthew Wilson, a review of one of Fr. Spitzer’s books on the correlation of faith and science, and a review of a book on the pope and the holocaust. He also contributed an essay to the recently published Ignatius Critical Edition of The Great Gatsby on “What is The Great Gatsby Really About?”. Equally at home with poetry and prose, fact and fiction, faith and science, and the papacy and history, Dr. Como, like C.S. Lewis, could write on anything and everything with eloquence and lucidity.

On December 23rd, James Como would have celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday. Our prayers should be offered for his family and friends who will be mourning his absence on his birthday and at Christmas, but we should also rejoice that he will be celebrating the birth of the Christ Child in the company of heaven. Having written a book on Narnia, he has now passed further up and further in. Having passed through the wardrobe of death, he is beyond the reach of the wicked ones who would make it always winter but never Christmas. He is now where it is never winter and always Christmas.

__________

The featured image is courtesy of James Como’s website.