Absolutely —
Mere Christianity and
The Screwtape Letters (click the titles) were formative for me, along with contact with two local conservative high-Episcopal churches, when I was about 20, and I recommend them to everyone.
All these pointed to a real, solid Christianity crashing neither on the Scylla of devotional/millennial/charismatic hysteria nor on the Charybdis of AmChurch dissent/modernism/liberal Protestantism/agnosticism. In short, where I’ve dropped anchor today, dead center in the historic mainstream of orthodox, catholic Christianity, the historic, apostolic Church.
In fact, on this board (or its predecessor, byzantines.org) I have described my faith as ‘mere Christianity’ with icons!
Lewis was fascinating — more Catholic than his many evangelical/Jesus Freak admirers in the ’70s and ’80s knew (or admitted).
He believed in purgatory. He went to Confession (starting late, around 1939 — he died in 1963, the same day JFK was murdered). The Irish-born Lewis had some residual Protestant prejudice against the Catholic Church he never quite shook in his lifetime, and he never identified himself with the
Anglo-Catholic movement but he went to one of Oxford’s many Anglo-Catholic churches, in Headington, simply out of obedience because he lived in the parish.
I also read the
Narnia books when I was 10 but of course didn’t fully appreciate their message at the time. Good stuff, too, even though Lewis’ friend J.R.R. Tolkien, a sound Catholic, thought they were too heavy-handed with the religious allegory.
