The correspondence between Lewis and Sayers

Related reading and listening

• Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia — Alex Markos explores the transformational power of Aslan as the Christ figure in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (31 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
• Early evangelical response to C. S. Lewis — Historian Mark Noll discusses the reasons why American evangelicals were initially slow to warm to Lewis. (15 minutes)
• “A state of divine carelessness” — FROM VOL. 121 Daniel Gabelman attempts to correct the notion that George MacDonald prizes seriousness and sobriety. (20 minutes)
• Friendship and life together — In a lecture at Providence College, Ken Myers explores how the concept of friendship, which used to be central to political philosophy, was banished from considerations of public life as the state was exalted over society. (53 minutes)
• “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
• On The Abolition of Man — FROM VOL. 154 Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes)
• Seeking control, in white magic and The Green Book — Alan Jacobs on C. S. Lewis’s critique of the modern pursuit of god-like control
• Education, reason, and the Good — Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson on C. S. Lewis’s argument about natural law
• Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)
• In the image of an Imaginer — Dorothy L. Sayers on the inevitability of analogical language about God (and everything else)
• Freeing dogma from arcane captivity — Dorothy L. Sayers argues that chattering about “Christian values” while ignoring theology is pointless
• Dorothy L. Sayers revisited — In interviews from 1993 and 1999, biographer Alzina Stone Dale and novelist Jill Paton Walsh talk about the life and work of Dorothy L. Sayers. (24 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
• An unlikely trio in life (and in death) — FROM VOL. 1Philosopher Peter Kreeft was interviewed in 1982 by Ken Myers about his book, Between Heaven and Hell. In 1992, that interview was featured on the pilot cassette tape which became the Mars Hill Tapes. (10 minutes)
• With virtue, harmony, & charity — Kevin Vost traces a Christian development of the meaning of friendship throughout history, particularly as it is understood through the incarnation of Christ. (18 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 155 — FEATURED GUESTS: Donald Kraybill, Thaddeus Kozinski, David Bentley Hart, Nigel Biggar, Ravi Scott Jain, and Jason Baxter
• The Narnian as Jeremiah — Michael Ward on the bleak prognosis in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
• MYST and mythic guests — Game designers Rand and Robyn Miller explain how their game’s creation was influenced by their love for the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. (13 minutes)
• Sneaking past watchful dragons — Junius Johnson describes how Hans Urs von Balthasar’s understanding of Creation resonates with that of C. S. Lewis and Bonaventure, all three of whom served as mentors in his thinking about beauty. (18 minutes)
• Marva Dawn on spiritual formation and being Church — This Feature presents an interview with Marva Dawn from Volume 38 of the Journal, during which she talks about concerns discussed in two of her books, related to the spiritual formation of children and a more holistic understanding of sex and intimacy. (23 minutes)
• Becoming a serious and receptive reader — David Lyle Jeffrey offers a thoughtful reading of C. S. Lewis’s account of thoughtful reading
• Walter Hooper, R.I.P., and Christina Rossetti’s Advent poems — Walter Hooper (1931-2020) describes his first meeting with C. S. Lewis, a man he so admired and long served. In a second chapter in today’s Feature, Emma Mason explains how Christina Rossetti’s hopeful eschatological beliefs influenced the poems she wrote about the season of Advent. (21 minutes)
• Erotic love (allegedly) conquers all — C. S. Lewis on why the “right to sexual happiness” makes totalitarian demands
• Thomas Howard, R.I.P. — Thomas Howard encouraged in many students and readers an imaginative appropriation of faith and truth. This interview — released at the time of his death in 2020 — includes his discussion of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. (55 minutes)
• The sins of the fathers . . . and ours — Eighty years ago, C. S. Lewis warned against surrogate contrition
• Spirits in Bondage: Lewis’s early poetry — Karen Swallow Prior and Don W. King discuss C. S. Lewis’s early poetry and the evidence therein of a “frustrated dualism.” (23 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 146 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Mitchell, Hans Boersma, Henry T. Edmondson, III, Brian Clayton, Douglas Kries, Conor Sweeney, and Carole Vanderhoof
• Three books by Peter Kreeft — In excerpts from three interviews, Peter Kreeft discusses our “brave new world”; the importance of integrity in “creed, code, and cult”; and the reality of transcendence in our human story. (36 minutes)
• Thomas Howard: “The ‘Moral Mythology’ of C. S. Lewis” — Thomas Howard describes C. S. Lewis’s fictional works in terms of a mythological re-presentation of the Christian and pre-modern moral and cosmic vision. (41 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 144 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jonathan Mcintosh, Kevin Vost, Malcolm Guite, R. David Cox, Grant Brodrecht, and Peter Bouteneff
• Alison Milbank: Imaginative Apologetics beyond C. S. Lewis — Alison Milbank offers an approach to defending the Christian faith that restores the imagination as a faculty inseparable from reason. (61 minutes)
• The genius, rhetoric, and humanity of C. S. Lewis — James Como and Walter Hooper examine the greatness of C. S. Lewis — his multifaceted genius as well as his humanity and humor. (21 minutes)
• Further up and further in: understanding Narnia — Joseph Pearce explains how fairy stories can open our eyes to the depths of reality if we read them with the virtue of humility. (15 minutes)
• C. S. Lewis on communities of thought — Alan Jacobs talks about C. S. Lewis’s two essays, “The Inner Ring” and “Membership” and how they explore the fact that all of our thinking is situated within relationships. (19 minutes)
• Paul Tyson: Escaping the Silver Chair — With the help of C. S. Lewis’s story The Silver Chair, Paul Tyson explains how identifying and then escaping the ways in which we are bewitched about what is “really real” is no easy task. (68 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 138 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Milbank, Adrian Pabst, Glenn W. Olsen, Rupert Shortt, Oliver O’Donovan, David Bentley Hart
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 134 — FEATURED GUESTS: Chris Armstrong, Grevel Lindop, Michael Martin, William T. Cavanaugh, Philip Turner, and Gisela Kreglinger
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 133 — FEATURED GUESTS: Darío Fernández-Morera, Francis Oakley, Oliver O’Donovan, Thomas Storck, John Safranek, Brian Brock, and George Marsden
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
• Irrigating deserts — C. S. Lewis on why teachers must train the sentiments
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
• The Heav’ns and All the Powers Therein — Michael Ward makes a compelling case that the qualities attributed to the seven planets in the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages are embodied in C. S. Lewis‘s seven books about Narnia. (68 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
• People, people who poke people . . . — Christine Rosen on how social media encourages the unsociable traits of narcissism and exhibitionism.
• Alan Jacobs on The Narnian — Alan Jacobs discusses C. S. Lewis’s view of the imagination and his deep conviction that the shaping of the conscience requires the training of the imagination. (53 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 77 — FEATURED GUESTS: Eric Miller, Lisa de Boer, Peter J. Schakel, and Alan Jacobs
• The arts and public funding — Ken Myers answers a letter from a high school student asking about whether Christians should support the idea of federal funding for the arts.