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The title that I have settled on after about three versions is this.

Seus Lewis romantic rationalist,

how Lewis's paths to Christ shaped his life in ministry.

So I felt like in this first plenary I should give an account for the title of the conference.

And so I'm going to tackle those two phrases

plus two others that grow out of those two. Some of you might wonder why would you devote an entire national conference to a mere fallible, imperfect, mortal like CS Lewis.

Let me begin with an accolade from Peter Kreft that gives you a flavor of why.

Once upon a dreary era, when the world of specialization had nearly made obsolete all universal geniuses,

romantic poets, platonic idealists, rhetorical craftsmen, and even Orthodox Christians, there appeared a man, almost as if from another world,

on the world, one of the worlds of his own fiction.

Was he a man?

Something more like an elf or an angel.

Who was all this and more as an amateur,

as well as probably the world's foremost authority in the professional province of medieval and Renaissance English literature.

Before his death in 1963, he found time to produce some first quality works of literary history, literary criticism, theology, philosophy, autobiography, biblical studies, historical

philology, fantasy, science fiction, letters, poems, sermons, formal and informal essays, a historical novel, a spiritual diary,

religious allegory, short stories, and children's novels,

Clive Staples Lewis was not a man.

It was a world.

End of quote.

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