Book Review: C. S. Lewis Then and Now

Abstract

By Wesley A. Kort. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-514342-6. Pp. 194. $25.00. If Doris T. Myers' fine book C. S. Context (1994) offers readers an understanding of public context of language when wrote his best fiction 1940s and 1950s, Wesley A. Kort's C. S. Then and Now attempts to place Lewis's context of twenty-first-century America. Kort, Professor of Religion at Duke University, has written a thoughtful, penetrating book. While he could have focused narrowly on sociology of religious ideas Lewis's work, Kort avoids this pitfall; instead, he takes readers into what I think of as most useful aspects of Lewis's for people [particularly university students] attempting to articulate `world and life views' that are both relevant to our current location and informed by religious (9). Although Kort admits that is dated he nonetheless argues that in his there are strategies, critical moves and insights, and large bits of construction worth imitating and using. In particular, Kort finds much to admire Lewis's avoidance of two errors characteristic of contemporary American Christianity: viewing modern culture as and irremediable and believing that can be self-enclosed (5). Accordingly, Kort's goal is to take insights of then--roughly his writings of 1940s and 1950s--and try to apply to contemporary American culture now In his first chapter, Retrieval Kort notes that literary have moved away from formalism and disciplinary orthodoxy and toward interdisciplinary as well as matters of theory and practice that engaged Lewis--education and curricula, value theory, continuities between high and popular culture, relation of power and ideology to beliefs and ideas, and moral consequences of intellectual and technological imperialism. As a result, the combination of literary with historical, theoretical, cultural, critical, and moral/religious ingredients normalizes Lewis's current literary studies (13). Much of rest of chapter considers how Lewis's goes a long way toward retrieving and reconstructing a relation between religious belief and English culture. The next chapter, Reenchantment explores how Lewis believes that religion can be rightly understood only by people who live a world that is at least to some degree (33). In addition to providing an historical review of how world came to be disenchanted for most people, Kort refers to Lewis's The Abolition of Man as primary text which analyzes and critiques this disenchantment. In large measure Kort argues that sees human relationships as ail-important; however, since cultural movement has been toward more and more isolation and individuation, disenchantment bas been inevitable result. He summarizes what we can learn from Lewis: For world once again to be enchanted [...] we must recognize (1) that we have a cultural location, (2) that our characteristic methods of analysis are partial and strategic, (3) that larger world has a real or potential value and meaning which must be recognized, and (4) that as individuals and groups we have value not primarily isolation from or opposition to others but relationships with them (49). The third chapter, Houses considers the place of spatial language Lewis's work (53). Citing examples from works as varied as Surprised by Joy, The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, That Hideous Strength, Till We Have Faces, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters, Kort shows how uses housing as a metaphor for an adequate sense of world and of one's relations to and within it (65). The core of book is Culture both literal middle chapter of seven and longest one book. …