This is Your Morning Basket, where we help you bring truth, goodness, and beauty to your homeschool day.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode 23 of the Your Morning Basket podcast. I'm Pam Barnhill,

your host, and thank you so very much for taking the time out to join me here today. We have a

wonderful interview for you today. I got to talk to Kristen Ditchfield, who is the author of

a family guide to Narnia. Now, we did talk about

Narnia quite a bit, which was really fascinating, but also we talked about the power of literature

to shape us and our children as people. I just really enjoyed getting to sit down and talk to

Kristen about this. I think you guys are going to

enjoy the conversation too, so we're going to get on with it right now.

Kristen Ditchfield is a professional freelance writer, a conference speaker, and the host of the syndicated daily

radio program, Take It to Heart. She is the author of numerous books, including a family

guide to Narnia, a user-friendly resource intended to take the reader book by book through

C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. In this book, Kristen illuminates the biblical

truths and parallels that can be found throughout these classics. She joins us today to discuss how

reading these books and others during morning time can help us turn our attention toward truth,

goodness, and beauty as a family. Kristen, welcome to the program. It's great to be with you. Well,

you know, many of people approach the Chronicles of Narnia as allegorical. So could you kind of tell us

what is allegory? And do you think the Chronicles of Narnia actually falls into this category?

Well, sure. Many people do refer to them as allegory or allegorical.

Technically, from a literary standpoint, an allegory is a story in which every character and event,

every detail is meant to be a symbol of something else. And it's meant to tell, you know,

it's a story within a story. It's meant to tell another

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