I am impressed with C.S. Lewis scholar, Louis Markos, Professor of English at Houston (TX) Baptist University. He produced a vision statement on his website which I very much appreciate.
Although a devoted professor who works closely with his students, I am dedicated to the concept of the professor as public educator. I firmly believe that knowledge must not be walled up in the academy, but must be freely and enthusiastically disseminated to all those "who have ears to hear." As a specifically Christian professor, I also adhere to a second goal: to fuse into a single stream the humanist strivings of Athens and the Christian truths of Jerusalem. Believing that “all truth is God’s truth,” I seek to measure all human knowledge against the touchstone of orthodox Christian doctrine (the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Resurrection). Believing further that Christianity is not the only truth but the only COMPLETE truth, I seek to discover in the cultures, mythologies, religions and philosophies of the ancient (and modern) world intimations and foreshadowings of the greater truths revealed in Christ and the Bible. In pursuing this goal, my three principle mentors have been Plato, Dante, and C. S. Lewis, my central vision has been that of the Magi (whose pagan wisdom proved a partial guide to encountering the Christ child), and my core biblical passage Paul's address to the Areopagus at Athens (Acts 17).
His book Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World is very much worth reading, as is his truly excellent movie review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His extensive treatment of the movie's shortcomings in its depiction of Aslan is one of the best and most comprehensive I have read. He concludes by saying
Perhaps our modern age and cinema are not capable of fully conceiving and realizing a character like Aslan. Perhaps Lewis was right that we have lost our ability to perceive of something as being both beautiful and terrible, that we have lost (really lost) our sense of the sacred. "When they tried to look at Aslan's face," writes Lewis in Chapter XII, "they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes and then they found they couldn't look at him and went all trembly." Does there lurk in this sentence a kind of real magic that our modern world, that not even the Hollywood Dream Factory, can capture or understand?
If so, we had better start reading our Lewis again. . . and our Bibles.
Markos will be a plenary speaker at the Taylor University conference on C.S. Lewis and Friends in June of 2006