Here is the provocative title of a stimulating essay by Dr. Michael Weingrad: “Why There is no Jewish Narnia.”

Professor Weingrad, whose article appears in the Spring, 2010 issue of the Jewish Review, directs the Jewish Studies program at Portland State University. (His book, American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States, will be published this fall by Syracuse University Press.)

In this compelling and erudite essay, Professor Weingrad takes notice of two recent works of imaginative fiction that both illustrate and problematize his dramatic question (The Magicians, Lev Grossman, Viking, 416 pp., $26.95; Ha-Mayim she-bein ha-olamot (trans. The Water Between the Worlds) by Hagar Yanai, Keter, 313 pp., 88 NIS; available only in Hebrew).

In contextualizing these works, he demonstrates his appreciation for the mythical worlds created by Tolkien and Lewis, while at the same time revealing his perceptive grasp of how one’s exposure to world literature and its unique genres affects both different reading cultures and the writers they produce so variously.

For instance, he believes,

“We should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.”

For any of my Texas readers, let me invite you to join me at Concordia University, Austin, TX, April 15, 2010, 11:30 AM, for their Annual C. S. Lewis lecture.

I will speaking on the topic, “‘Inside Language’: C. S. Lewis and The Bible in the 21st Century,” hosted by Concordia Professor and C. S. Lewis scholar, Dr. Joel Heck.

My talk is a meditation on what it means for Jack to say:

“It is Christ himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.” —C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis (8 November 1952), p. 247.

Lewis is one of those “good teachers,” whose commitment to apostolic doctrine and submersion in Christian tradition spared him from the twin excesses of fundamentalism and liberalism in his times, and continue to guard us from stumbling into them in our own. Jack, like Tolkien, “had been ‘inside language,’” understanding the complex relationships among word, image, metaphor, and myth, and how, as creatures made in God’s image, we are enjoined to make meaning: inside and outside of Scripture. The Bible’s purpose in our century and throughout those millennia preceding it is to “bring us to Him.”

One of my goals is to try to elucidate Lewis’s “reception and use” of Scripture, and how he can guide us in the wise reading of its authority and central purpose in our lives in the 21st Century.

My talk is built upon research and reflection I did as one of several collaborators on The C.S. Lewis Bible, to be published this November by Harper One. According to Harper’s marketing materials, “this NRSV Bible provides readings comprised of selections from Lewis’s celebrated spiritual classics, a collection that includes Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, A Grief Observed, The Weight of Glory and The Abolition of Man, as well as letters, poetry, and Lewis’s less-familiar works.

“Each reading, paired alongside relevant passages in the Bible, offers C.S. Lewis as a companion to a reader’s daily meditation of scripture. As people engage in their devotional Bible reading, they will also gain insight from his writings and spiritual journey as they invite Lewis into their spiritual discipline. The notes contain over 600 selections from C.S. Lewis for contemplation and devotional reading.”

It includes an introductory preface by Dr. Jerry Root of Wheaton College, Illinois.

Tlll We Have Faces––heavily motivated by Lewis’s longtime interest in the cupid/psyche myth, but now influenced by and filtered through his courtship and marriage to Joy Davidman and mature Christian faith, and interwoven with several complementary writing projects of the roughly same period (Surprised by Joy; The Four Loves; An Experiment in Criticism)––represents a nuanced spiritual conversion story vaguely autobiographical but also comprising the singular narrative of every journey from bondage to freedom, from cavelight to sunshine, both painful and telling, demanding and piercing. It is daring, experimental, and unlike anything before or after it in Lewis’s published work.

Lewis intends its world, like Narnia’s, to stand on its own, offering no convenient Wardrobe entry point, demanding of its reader the patient, slow, respectful invasion by which he or she willingly becomes incarnate, submerged in a strange and forbidding new world where all the usual modern and familiar Lewisian signposts are absent; where one must learn page by page, monologue by soliloquy, what is happening, to whom, and what the “culture” of Glome is like, much in the fashion of Lewis’s famous, “Meditation in a Toolshed” essay (found in God in the Dock).

In this manner, the reader experiences firsthand the incremental and gestalt-like appearance of truth, wisdom, and, eventually, revelation. But only by dying to self. “Die before you die,” is the central, most important recognition in the work. Lewis forces the reader to accept this principle even to get to the work’s last pages. Thus, TWHF demands––and rewards––multiple readings. “For him who eyes to see and ears to hear,” that is the motive and the message.

The Four Loves’ treatment of “devouring love” must be seen as a crucial backdrop (not to mention the path to Sehnsucht in Surprised by Joy), noting both the fact of its composition in roughly the same period but also their commonalities of theme. This too is a characteristic of Lewis: to produce “duets,” to have a prose version of fictional text to accompany each other in time (e.g., think of Problem of Pain and Great Divorce with Screwtape; Preface to Paradise Lost and Perelandra; Abolition of Man with That Hideous Strength; Miracles and The Chronicles of Narnia).

Tags: Till We Have Faces

Seventh Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C. S. Lewis & Friends
June 3-6, 2010

Keynote speakers include:

Devin Brown:”What to Look for in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader”

To submit paper proposals, contact Thom Satterlee, Colloquium Chair, by email at thsatterlee@taylor.edu or by post at Thom Satterlee / Department of English / Taylor University / Upland, IN 46989.

For info on Call for papers, use this link.

For registration information, use this link.

---

For any other information, contact: Laura Constantine at (765) 998-4690

I recently posted this series of questions to my Linked-In group, “C. S. Lewis Readers and Scholars Association,” and thought I might share it with earnest readers of this blog for their reflections and insights:

C. S. Lewis and Time Travel Science-Fiction — is there a Christian view of time travel that permits its orthodox “reception and use”?

---

In view of the latest Star Trek movie’s new time travel thread: I ask this distinguished group, “What are the theological implications of time travel themes? And is there a feasible Biblically-honoring version, or are all time-travel conceptualizations inherently and implicitly anti-omniscient-monotheism, and anti-trinitarian in particular?”

For instance, do all time-travel premises presumptively indulge the human fantasy of self-aggrandizing re-insertions of oneself in alternate histories to avoid divine justice and undermine divine sovereignty with impunity?

Do such narratives necessarily presume time-travelers are thereby equipped with noetic advantages (past, present, or future) that are, in fact, serpentine in origin (i.e., isn’t that what the original FALL is about anyway?—gaining and presuming to use forbidden knowledge for which we are not suited or ready for?)

Is “traveling” in time tantamount to necromancy, i.e., seeking states of being and ill-begotten short-cuts to maturity ["godhood"] that cannot be attained through abstract knowledge alone, hence a gnostic error?

Is the time-delimited nature of human life (“time’s entropic nature”) the fatal flaw in ever conceiving of a bonafide Christian S/F universe that could feature a reputable, theologically-defensible version of time travel? Is the Son of God ever (e.g., his possible theophany in the fiery furnace) depicted as a “time traveller”?

Nothing in CSL’s Space Trilogy itself seems directly to embrace or challenge or upset the extant “space-time continuum” per se as many, if not most secular “time machine” stories do. Ransom may have one foot in eternity, but he is also constrained by time. Aslan goes to and fro in Narnia as he pleases, transverses multiple worlds, but when the Pevensies return from their first adventure, it’s like nothing much has changed in Terra’s years.

So is there a useful difference between “normal time-travel” and inter-dimensional travel, i.e., BETWEEN worlds/dimensions, that only incidentally affects or deflects time within just one of those worlds/dimensions?

The C. S. Lewis Foundation announced today (Dec. 16, 2009) the plans for the founding of C S Lewis College near Amherst, MA. The details from their press release:

Property purchased by Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. from Northfield Mount Hermon School will become the home of a new college to be established by the C.S. Lewis Foundation, the organizations announced Wednesday.

Hobby Lobby, a privately held national retail chain of more than 400 arts and crafts stores, purchased property in Northfield, Mass., from the Northfield Mount Hermon School (NMH).The property will become home of C.S. Lewis College, a college of great books and visual and performing arts.

The announcement was made on the Northfield campus by representatives from the three organizations. NMH, a boarding school with 630 students from around the country and the world, consolidated its program onto its nearby Mount Hermon campus in 2005 and has been seeking a new owner for the Northfield campus. As owner of the Northfield property, Hobby Lobby will invest more than $5 million in operations and capital improvement projects in support of the creation of the College.
For information on the transaction and the new College, visit www.cslewiscollege.org.

“This is a win for the C.S. Lewis Foundation, a win for the Northfield Mount Hermon School and a win for Hobby Lobby,” said Steven Green, president of Hobby Lobby. “Our three organizations all care deeply about education and establishing a worthwhile mission on the historic Northfield campus. We also share a vision of preserving and honoring the legacy of D.L. Moody.”

Green said Hobby Lobby has worked with NMH and the C.S. Lewis Foundation to ensure that alumni can continue to visit the Northfield campus.

The C.S. Lewis Foundation has been considering several locations throughout the United States for the College. Foundation officials plan to open the College in 2012, pending appropriate approvals and accreditations.

“Today, as never before, young people are seeking an education that fully prepares them to understand and engage contemporary culture in a meaningful and creative way,” said Dr. Stan Mattson, founder and president of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. “The scenic and historic Northfield campus is an ideal setting for such a journey. We have already begun our work with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in hopes of opening C.S. Lewis College for students in the fall of 2012.”

»» Read the rest! »»