Homeward Bound

Here is a brief excerpt from That Hideous Strength depicting one of the main characters as she is about to experience what is the equivalent of a “conversions experience”. I think it is quite good. “Jane had gone into the garden to think. She accepted what the Director had said, yet it seemed to her nonsensical. His comparison between Mark’s love and God’s (since apparently there was a God) had struck her nascent Spirituality as indecent and irreverent. “Religion” ought to mean a realm in which the haunting female fear of being treated as a thing, an object of barter and desire and possession, would be set permanently at rest and what she called her true self would soar upwards and expand in some freer and purer world. “Religion” was a kind of exhalation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from specially gifted souls toward a receptive heaven. Then, quite sharply, it occurred to her that the Director never talked about religion; nor did the Dimbles nor Camilla. They ta...

As many of you know, I love C. S. Lewis. My dad read me The Chronicles of Narnia in my formative years, and they will always have a special place in my heart. I enjoyed Mere Christianity . I loved The Screwtape Letters . I am amazed at the analysis of the human psyche in ‘Till We have Faces and The Great Divorce . Even compilations of various essays such as The Weight of Glory and The Problem of Pain I found simply riveting—even in the areas I disagree with Lewis. Then there is this Space Trilogy . I read Out of Silent Planet several years ago and found it, well, interesting. I enjoy Lewis’s prose and style of writing, but it was unlike the others. I read Perelandra soon after, and I enjoyed it a bit more than the first, but it seemed to drag in the endless back and forth dialogue. The series seemed just so different from everything I had previously read from Lewis. Upon finishing That Hideous Strength ( the third in the series) and, after thinking about it, and after some ad...