The Lion's World

Rowan Williams addresses the things worth treasuring in the Chronicles of Narnia series: "The possibility Lewis still offers of coming across the Christian story as if for the first time."

"Lewis is trying to recreate for the reader what it is like to encounter and believe in God."

"The point of Narnia is to help us rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity - which is almost everything."

"How do you make fresh what is thought to be familiar, so familiar that it doesn't need to be thought about? Try making up a world in which these things can be met without preconceptions, a world in which the strangeness of the Christian story is encountered for what it is, not as part of a familiar eccentricity of behaviour called religion."

Williams addresses directly the repugnance many feel at the sexism, racism and violence of Narnia. Most famously the charge made from JRR Tolkien to Philip Pullman (author of the anti-Narnia, His Dark Materials) that Lewis is reactionary and dishonest.

"... the essential thing is this invitation to hear the story as if we had never heard it before."