For Fans of C.S. Lewis

Lewis never tried to hide what Narnia was about. Aslan's death and return in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is one of the most direct allegories in popular fiction, yet it works as story first. The sacrifice has weight, the resurrection has joy, and children who have never heard a word of theology respond to both. That is the trick: Lewis believed a good myth could carry meaning that a direct argument could not, because myth engages feeling and imagination together. Reading Lewis is partly reading a man who genuinely believed this, and that belief is contagious.

Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters as a set of memos from a senior devil to a junior devil advising on how to corrupt a human soul. The joke is that every spiritual trap Screwtape describes is recognizable from daily life: distraction, resentment, the slow drift toward spiritual numbness, the way we prefer pleasant feelings about God to God himself. The genius of the device is that it forces you to think about virtue from the outside, from the enemy's point of view. Decades on, every observation still lands.

The Inklings were not just a writing group. J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud from The Lord of the Rings to Lewis while Lewis was developing Narnia, and it was Tolkien who convinced Lewis that a Christian myth could be beautiful rather than merely didactic. In turn, Lewis championed Tolkien's work at Oxford when colleagues were dismissive. Reading both authors together reveals how much they were in conversation: both believed that story was a form of sub-creation, a way of reflecting the shape of a larger truth. Starting with either leads naturally to the other.