Mere Christianity, as you likely recall, is a collection of three smaller books that were published in the early 1940’s. Even before this they were individual broadcasts on BBC radio. Each of the individual talks are very insightful, so a person can pick any of them and gain insight from what Lewis shares. However, as I was reading over the two radio talks for this period I got to thinking that these could easily be the best. In Mere Christianity you can quickly identify them because they have the same chapter title, “Faith.” Initially given on the 1st and 8th in 1942, they are actually a two-part message.
Professionally Lewis created various writings on literary criticism and literary history. Spenser’s Images of Life, a title that came out on the 2nd in 1967, is his longest piece on the former. It came out four years after his death, but it was a book he had wanted to do himself. Edited by Alastair Fowler, who had been a graduate student of Lewis, the content is based on notes from lectures he gave at Cambridge on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
Letters written to Wormwood were coming to a close this month in 1941. On the 7th the twenty-eighth was published in The Guardian. In it we learn that Screwtape has to spell things out about death to his nephew: it really isn’t a “prime evil” and survival isn’t “the greatest good,” but that is what devils want humans to believe. Three years later on the 10th and also in The Guardian the first installment of “Who Goes Home? Or The Grand Divorce” began. Today it is known as The Great Divorce. On that date the first chapter was printed and readers are only given a vague idea about what is going on as the narrator is presented as someone who doesn’t know why he is at a bus stop.