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| Quote from Lewis' Mere Christianity, photo source here. |
The author who gave us Aslan and the land of Narnia,
C. S. Lewis, was for many years an atheist. He described his conversion in
Surprised by Joy: "In the Trinity term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God ... perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
Between 1941 and 1944, Lewis was invited to give a series of talks about Christianity on BBC radio. After the first set of talks was well received he also presented some lectures to soldiers, which he considered war work. His broadcasts resulted in many people converting to Christianity - and a lot of letters for Lewis to answer. The text of his talks was published in a book called
Mere Christianity.
C.S. Lewis' seven
Chronicles of Narnia were written and published between 1948 and 1956. (Click
here to read "Narnia: Fantasy in Fur Coats" from a BBC biographical article about Lewis.)
You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books 'represents' something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim's Progress [a 1678 allegory by John Bunyan] but I'm not writing in that way. I did not say to myself 'Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia': I said, 'Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.'
-C.S. Lewis, quoted in Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide
The last book Lewis published, and one he considered his best, was
Till We Have Faces, an unusual retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. It's actually one of my favorite books - and is wonderful Lenten reading!
“Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet” (from Till We Have Faces).
C.S. Lewis died on the 22nd November, 1963, one week shy of his 65th birthday. He never wanted his death to be widely acknowledged, and he got his way. American President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the same day. The author of
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, also died on the 22nd.
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