The Man from Oxford

I watched a movie recently that ended with a character attempting to write an essay entitled ” The Most Fascinating Person I Never Met.”

Being a writer, I immediately thought of many persons I’d choose to spotlight.

But in the context of this website, one man returns again and again–a man whose second paragraph in Chapter 1 of Mere Christianity broke new ground in my mind’s terrain.

Clive Staples Lewis is still a popular name on many American bookshelves. Like J. R. R. Tolkien, also an Oxford professor who won American readers and moviegoers with The Lord of the Rings, Lewis succeeded in capturing literary America with his beloved Chronicles of Narnia series. The first story in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published in 1950 (C. S. Lewis Images of His World, Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1973).

I’d never heard of Lewis, the land of Narnia, or any of his work until he was briefly mentioned in one of my college classes the year Shadowlands premiered (a movie based on his life).

Why would a girl from rural North Carolina know anything about a brilliant Oxford professor’s literature that never entered the doors of her public school classrooms?

It wasn’t until much later, after college and Graduate School studies, that I discovered the little paperback, Mere Christianity, in a discounted barrel at the Books A Million store.

It was 1999, the same year I embarked on my spiritual journey.

This southern gal had done picked up the thoughts of an intellectual giant from the faraway land of England.

How could I have known I’d still be learning from and loving this person I’d never met over 25 years later?

( will continue this…)