The Life and Writings of C.S. Lewis

In these lectures you will cover Lewis's spiritual autobiography and other creative works, as well as his scholarly writings that reflect on pain and grief, love and friendship, prophecy and miracles, and education and mythology. Professor Louis Markos is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and has won teaching awards at both the University of Michigan and Houston Baptist University. He presents this course as a sympathetic, deeply felt exposition of Lewis's multifaceted thought and works, making no secret of the fact that he is a longtime and enthusiastic fan of Lewis's writings. Because so much of his life was reflected in his works, to understand C. S. Lewis the writer it is essential to know C. S. Lewis as a man and literary figure. Professor Markos has crafted his course to focus in the first six lectures on Lewis's personal convictions and thought, concentrating on his nonfiction works. In covering Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim's Regress, Professer Markos argues that Lewis's "real" biography is the story of his spiritual pilgrimage. Why did he see his movement toward Christianity in terms of joy and desire? How did this influence his apologetics? "If you wish to take Lewis's works seriously, you must accept them as creations of passionate thinking: of the spiritual brought down to the physical, of experience carried up into reason." Lewis's Tales: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Allegory In Lectures 7 through 11, we turn to Lewis the fictional novelist: the unfallen world of Perelandra in the "Space Trilogy" (1938-45) the beloved "Chronicles of Narnia" (1950-56) children's series for which he is perhaps best known Till We Have Faces (1961), a mature and beautiful reworking of the Cupid and Psyche myth whose heroine is patterned after Lewis's wife, Joy. All five of these lectures offer synopses of the key plot elements in each work and explore Christian allegories that lurk just below the surface of each tale.