TC says:
I will say right up front that I have never warmed up to C. S. Lewis but I know a lot of people adore him. I have been warming up to Rowan Williams and what he says about the problems of rights and democracy but I'm in no way ready to address what he says about that. I do like what he says in this talk about the ideas we have about God - in a real sense anything we think about God will inevitably be something like in idol because God is going to always be beyond what we can imagine at any given time. I've never read the Narnia books. I have a feeling I'd find what Rowan Williams had to say about them would be more interesting to me than the books, themselves.
Read the "Narnia" books as a kid; remembered them rather fondly. Tried to read them again years later, stopped after the first one. The rest were utter crap, and that first one wasn't so good. And "Screwtape"? Fuggedaboutit! Tolkien was right to be cheesed at Lewis. Tolkien is far too "faux-archaic" in his writing (the movies are a vast improvement, rare for such a translation to film) for me to read again (the films ruined him for me; "The Hobbit" is better because it's written to be lighter. When he decided to be serious, he turned pseudo-King James, which too many translators of ancient texts did until the late 20th century).
I think I'd prefer what Rowan Williams says about Lewis over Lewis direct, any day. I find even Lewis' basic ideas about Christianity and modernity a muddle of Chesterton and Bultmann, without the insight of the former or the biblical erudition/scholarship of the latter.
But maybe that's just me....
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