I just read the revised and updated edition of John Beversluis’s C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Very interesting.

I confess I hadn’t paid much attention to C.S. Lewis’s apologetics before. Oh, it’s impossible not to know about his books, since they’re so popular among conservative Christians. I’ve every gone through a couple. But his arguments generally struck me as, well, so weak as not to be worth spending time on.

Beversluis’s book surprised me. Not because of his criticism of C.S. Lewis’s apologetics; as I said, I took it for granted that these were very poor arguments. I figured it would be good for a philosopher to take the time to go over them properly, but I saw it as the equivalent of a physicist spending time explaining what goes wrong with “free energy” schemes. Someone’s got to do it, but it really doesn’t interest me. But Beversluis convinced me that there’s actually something to be learned by a detailed examination of Lewis’s thought.

Anyway, it’s well worth reading, especially if you’re in an environment where C.S. Lewis’s kind of arguments are popular.