Michael Ward, PhD

Michael Ward was appointed as a distinguished faculty fellow at George Fox University in 2026. Every fall semester he spends a full week on the Newberg campus for a residency directly engaging undergraduate students and the public. During these visits, he guest-teaches sessions within the honors program, records specialized podcast episodes with George Fox Digital on C.S. Lewis and theological imagination, and delivers public lectures for the community.

Dr. Ward is a regularly featured speaker and contributor at our biennial Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference, which takes place every other September. He also meets George Fox students overseas each May in Oxford to give a custom lecture for the Juniors Abroad program.

A member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford in his native England, Dr. Ward is also a professor of apologetics at Houston Christian University and a distinguished visiting professor at Hillsdale College.

Dr. Ward is the author of the award-winning and best-selling Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press) and of After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Word on Fire Academic). He co-edited The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press) and presented the BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code.

On the 50th anniversary of Lewis's death, Dr. Ward unveiled a permanent national memorial to him in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, London. He is the co-editor of a volume of essays about this commemoration, entitled C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner.

He has a keen interest in film, both as analyst and performer. He co-authored Popcorn With the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List. He acted the role of C.S. Lewis’s parish priest in The Most Reluctant Convert and handed a pair of X-ray spectacles to Agent 007 in the James Bond movie The World is Not Enough. In real life he is a Catholic priest in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, assisting at Holy Rood Church, Oxford, alongside his work as an academic. Read more about Dr. Ward at michaelward.net.

Academic Background

PhD, Divinity, University of St. Andrews
MA, Theology, University of Cambridge
MA, English Language and Literature, University of Oxford

Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, Hillsdale College, Michigan
Honorary Doctorate in Sacred Theology, Thorneloe University, Ontario