My PhD is in comparative literature.

And so I've read literature in many different languages,

studied these in the course of my academic training.

And I wanted to approach Lewis in a slightly different way

than the previous two lectures that we had,

which I found to be utterly illuminating,

and I thank both of my colleagues

for what they did. Although I want to ask how Tolkien, remember the famous letter of Tolkien

to his son, how the Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work. We need to think about

that. And I want to talk about the words, our large subject here is the Christian imagination,

which I think Lewis has some very interesting insights about it.

I think he has very interesting insights about imagination in general,

because he too was a literary scholar and wanted to get clear about what the uses of the imagination were and are

and so I'm going to look a little bit at his theory I deliberately gave this title the practice and theory

in Lewis I'm going to look a little bit at his theory.

But there's also a warning about misuses of imaginative work

that I want to get to as well.

Because we all know that when we engage a work

like Tolkien or Flannery O'Connor, or many, many other writers,

they do something to us that's enchanted to what we've been talking about.

They take us out of our normal world into another world,

which is an important thing that Lewis thought they need to do.

...