| Home > Reading > As if you don't have enough you want to read already... |
| As if you don't have enough you want to read already... | | Date Created: Apr 21, 2005, 08:56 AM |
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| They only hold programmes for a week and I was too busy to tell you all in time, unfortunately, but BBC radio 7 recently broadcast an unabridged reading of the second book in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy Perelandra. I had forgotten what a great book it is, how amazing Lewis's imagination is. But most of all, how skilled Lewis was at integrating what he knew to be True with the stuff of everyday 'mundane' reality. |
| This kind of integrity and Christian imagination is almost exactly the opposite of what we Evangelicals from the 1960s (and some post-evangelicals in the '00s) call 'relevance'. Relevance as we used to practice it meant taking the stuff all around us as the solid reality and sorta squinting when we looked at God's word to throw it into a soft focus, allowing us to pick out the bits of Scripture and theology that suited the solid bottom line 'normal' reality of capitalistic New York City suburbs. Lewis's integration and imagination allowed him to do the other thing, the thing Messiah called us all to in parables like the Dishonest Steward or the Treasure in the Field -- to take what is actually solid and everlasting, God's revelation through Christ and through his word, and see the stuff all around us in soft focus. |
 Anyway, you've missed downloading the audio version perhaps, but can I encourage you to consider putting Perelandra (sometimes called A Voyage to Venus) into your stack of books (there's an audio version for sale, too)? Dare I say it: if I had a choice of whether you were to buy my new one or buy and read (or re-read) Lewis, I'd rather you read Lewis. I was blown away by it. |
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