So amusing but sad to see the lack of understanding about Christianity here. I suppose it's part of misunderstanding that fundamentalism is not Christianity. Lewis was an Anglican, a member of the Church of England. Very different from fundamentalism. The criticisms of Christianity here are not valid; only American fundamentalism is aptly critiqued.

Laura,

The Chronicles are my favorite books of all time. Like you, they lead me into the world of literature, where I am now a graduate student in English and a poet.

This article and the other one you wrote comparing Oz and the Chronicles have inspired me to write some criticism that isn't Christian. It's been some years, but I've read most of the rest of Lewis' popular works. Need to go back and read some more! I recall in recognizing the Platonic influences in the work when I was studying Greek philosophy.

Rich stuff. Gonna have to buy your new book!

Well... I can't say I was nearly as taken with "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" as Ms. Miller (I didn't even finish it), but I do very much understand the thrill of being grabbed by a novel for the very first time.

I had not been much of a reader, but when I was 8 or 9 my dad's secretary gave me the kid's novel "The Rat-A-Tat Mystery". I remember at the time, feeling that the story was kind of hokey (too many convenient coincidences), but also that the story was very gripping and interesting. After that I was hooked on books, and have been ever since.

Years later, as an adult, I happened across "The Rat-A-Tat Mystery" in a used bookstore. Out of curiosity, I bought and reread it, and had the exact same reaction, it was hokey but gripping!

I was so upset when I discovered the Christian analogy, and like Miller, I didn't get it until someone pointed it out to me (I think I was a little younger, like 11 or 12). And like Miller, it wasn't so much what the message was, as the sense of something going on, slyly, beneath my abilities to percieve.

Now, when we are adults and discover something like this, we tend to admire the author more. But I guess kids require more grounding, more direct communication. There's always that awareness that people know so much more than you, so much you need to know, and when the knowledge seem consciously withheld (though I don't think C.S. Lewis can really be accused of trying to be devious at all), it is very upsetting.

Like Miller, I completely rejected the books, and like her I returned to them later, a lot of my later appreciation stemming from my reading of his other works. Particularly, again like Miller, his work in literary criticism. (His A Paradise to Paradise Lost was to me very indicative of the way he regularly used very simple ideas as building blocks to a complex evaluation.)

I'm grateful to read this same response in others. I think I'd always considered my response an overreaction. I'm more comfortable with it now. Thanks.

I've already opened a page for amazon

ok - i didn't turn out to be a literary critic obviously, but i do remember which book first totally got me lost in my own world and into reading and i feel compelled to blurt it out here haha

- Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl. All his books were really dreamy to me as a kid. ahhhhhh...

That I too loved Narnia as a kid; but I did get part of the religious musing that went on, and what I got helped me on my own journey to atheism by encouraging me to actually think about theology. I never felt the dismay and betrayal of finding out it was supposed to be a Christian allegory, I think because I find religion an interesting part of humanity. I also love my family, and they're all religious; so I don't feel religion is a bad thing, it's just not my thing. I'm currently reading Narnia to my eight year old and she's loving it too.

I still have a special love in my heart for books about children stumbling upon new worlds. Pamala Dean's books are good too.

Using a children's book to shove religious allegory down the throats of young readers is creepy.

I didn't like the book as a kid. The first time Father Christmas showed up, I was annoyed. Seemed way too hokey.

It also bugged me that the evil witch's motives were never explained. Why was she evil -- who was she? At least with the Wicked Witch of the West, you sense it's sort of her career.

Never much cared for Mr. Tumnus. Sounds too much like Mr. Tummy. As in yummy yummy yummy. As in pervert.

Here's something I invite all readers to do: Next time you're in Borders or Waldenbooks or Barnes & Noble or a library, grab the last book of the series. Turn to the very last page. Read the BIG SECRET OF ALL SEVEN BOOKS. (Yes, there is a big secret of all seven books....a big, "Sixth Sense" type of secret...)

It will save you a lot of time.

Stuff I liked better than C.S. Lewis:

-- Roald Dahl stuff

-- Judy Blume stuff

-- Phantom Tollbooth

-- Encyclopedia Brown

-- Book of Three / The Black Narnia etc.

-- The Chocolate War / I Am the Cheese

-- Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew

-- "choose your own path to adventure" books

Er, "The Black Cauldron"...

The Black Narnia would be cool though. The children escape an Afro goddess, Mr. Tumnus is jivey, the lion is a black panther....that would rule.

“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be kind to beasts as well as man, it is all a sham.”

---Anna Sewell, author, Black Beauty

“I care not for a man’s religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it...I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”

---Abraham Lincoln

Christian writer C.S. Lewis noted that animals were included in the first Passover. The application of the “blood of the lamb” on the doorposts, not only saved a man and his family from death that night in Egypt, it saved his animals as well. Lewis put forth a rational argument concerning the resurrection of animals in The Problem of Pain. His 1947 essay, “A Case for Abolition,” attacked vivisection (animal experimentation) and reads in part as follows:

“Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we re backing up our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reason. Indeed, experiments on men have already begun. We all hear that Nazi scientists have done them. We all suspect that our own scientists may begin to do so, in secret, at any moment.

“The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements. In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.”

“I am not a Christian,” wrote one animal rights activist in Animals, Men and Morals (1971), “but I find it incomprehensible that those who preach a doctrine of love and compassion can believe that the material pleasures of meat-eating justify the slaughter it requires.”

In 1977, at an annual meeting in London of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), Dr. Donald Coggan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said, “Animals, as part of God’s creation, have rights which must be respected. It behooves us always to be sensitive to their needs and to the reality of their pain.”

Dr. L. Charles Birch, an Australian “eco-philosopher,” has long urged the churches to preach conservation of nature and respect for other living creatures. In July 1979 he argued at a conference of the World Council of Churches in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that all living creatures should be valued because of their “capacity for feeling.” Dr. Birch has also condemned "factory farming" -- the modern, overcrowded, confinement methods of raising and killing animals for food -- as “unethical,” and declared that “the animal rights movement should be supported by all Christians.”