Lupiverse(es)

Craig Brewer · 16 Mar 2012, 02:51 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2012 19:51:12 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Lupiverse(es)
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Phantastes was a beautiful book! Never besmirch the name of MacDonald! heh heh...


As someone who was raised in a relatively a-religious family, I usually just ignored the obviously religious bits of Lewis/Tolkien/whoever else. But as I got older, I found that the non-"preachy" manner of fictional Christian works actually worked to explain why faith was interesting and attractive. After all, here was some fantasy that might be real on a certain level, or at least a number of people thought so.

That's a perspective I've had trouble explaining to friends who had that "betrayal" reaction to Narnia.



________________________________
 From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 9:42 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Lupiverse(es)
 
On 3/15/2012 10:32 PM, Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote:
> Wasn't MacDonald a good half century older? And he was one of those mollified Presbyterians.
> But is it fair to criticise didacticism which didn't pretend to be anything else? I mean, neither MacDonald nor Lewis, that I know of, tried to present their books as doctrinally free. At least MacDonald was overt as to their didactic nature. It isn't Lewis's fault if the Narnia books got popular that they were pushed everywhere as mere children's books without a caveat that they were had a religious undercurrent. Maybe the real issue is that they are popular because that undercurrent pleases people, just as Praise of Empire pleased others, and those who take exception to that way of writing resent the popularity.

Well, if it's boring, it's boring. And it depends on what you mean by "didn't pretend"---as with Lewis, most of his readers were children. If you have no idea what you might be reading, you can't know whether it's pretense or not.

Certainly Lewis wasn't responsible for whatever marketing got his books in my local library and into my hands. But I doubt they were and are popular because they are religious: rather, they probably are popular because they are accessible, imaginative (sometimes magical, as you said), action-packed, well-written, comforting (Aslan always appeared to set things right), and morally nonthreatening. Girls read them as much as boys did, and no parents objected to them.
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