The Lion's World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia
2013; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2163-6214
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoThe Lion's World: A Journey into the Heart Narnia. By Rowan Williams. Illustrated by Monica Capoferri. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xiv + 152 pp. $16.95 (cloth).Fifty years after his death, C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) still inspires commentary, and his readers include both fierce detractors and passionate advocates. But rarely has his work drawn the public attention theologian Rowan Williams's caliber. Reasons for this qualitative neglect are obvious: Lewis was not professional theologian, but rather literary scholar, apologist, and creative writer; and his enormous popularity among diverse lay audience has generated backlash within the guild theology and religious studies.Thus, in the preface, Williams admits when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1970s, Lewis was a slightly embarrassing phenomenon whom proper theology students deemed themselves too sophisticated to take seriously. By contrast, he saw that the Lewis celebrated by evangelical devotees and looked down on by right-thinking Christian intellectuals was by no means the whole (p. x). Interestingly, he also acknowledges his own first exposure to Lewis was not through Narnia as child but through Lewis's works apologetics as an adolescent: Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Problem Pain, and so on. When Williams finally got around to the Chronicles Narnia, he was initially underwhelmed. However, he rediscovered them while at Cambridge, and realized he had missed their deeper merits. In general, Williams says, can only confess to being repeatedly humbled and reconverted by Lewis in way is true few other modern Christian writers. Re-reading works I have not looked at for time, I realize where good many favourite themes and insights came from, and I am constantly struck by the richness imagination and penetration can be contained even in relatively brief letter. He is someone you do not quickly come to the end of-as complex personality and as writer and thinker (p. xi). The Lewis emerges under Williams's probing gaze is thus, unsurprisingly, more interesting, complicated, ambiguous, and rewarding than the standard portrait, especially in the way Williams sees Lewis challenging, rather than simply promoting, conventional religious faith.Williams structures the book into six chapters, following an introduction which acknowledges the diversity opinion regarding Lewis's literary, moral, spiritual, and theological achievement in the Chronicles. Williams contends Lewis's great strategic insight is some matters are better dealt with through narrative and imagination than through attempts at systematizing: conclusion shouldn't surprise any reader Holy Scripture (p. 6). In particular, what Lewis sought to accomplish, and can still offer contemporary readers, is the possibility of coming across the Christian story as if for the first time (p. …
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