C. S. Lewis

Life and work

Lewis was raised nominally Christian in Belfast but became a committed atheist as a teenager, a position he held through his service in World War I (where he was wounded) and his early academic career as a literary scholar at Oxford, where he became a close friend of fellow scholar and devout Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien.

Through a combination of philosophical reasoning, the influence of Christian friends including Tolkien, and what he described in his memoir Surprised by Joy as a long, reluctant intellectual journey, Lewis converted first to theism in 1929 and then specifically to Christianity in 1931, later becoming an active Anglican layman rather than clergy.

During World War II, Lewis delivered a series of BBC radio talks explaining and defending basic Christian belief to a wartime British public, later compiled into Mere Christianity, which remains one of the most widely read works of popular Christian apologetics ever written.

Lewis's other major Christian works include The Screwtape Letters (a satirical correspondence from a senior to a junior demon), The Problem of Pain, and Surprised by Joy, alongside his celebrated Chronicles of Narnia children's series and his academic scholarship on medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and later Cambridge.

Lewis's writing has remained continuously in print and influential across a very wide range of Christian traditions — evangelical, Catholic, and mainline alike — an unusual reach for a writer who himself remained a fairly traditional Anglican layman throughout his life.

In their own words

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."Mere Christianity

Describes the human longing for a joy "no experience in this world can satisfy" as evidence pointing toward another world.The Weight of Glory

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: C. S. Lewis