A garden enclosed is my sister my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. -Canticles 4:12 I. Introduction To Christian writers, landscape and its seasons are not merely backdrops for plots and characters. As places of destination they are integral elements of quest narratives or pilgrimages. More importantly, nature's cyclical patterns often function as maps of the human soul: "o the Christian, the seasons' round, often represented by a contrast between spring...
Dante Alighieri
A Terrible Beauty: True and False Visions of the Good in Descent into Hell and Till We Have Faces
In a memorable passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, beauty is described as being an “awful thing...mysterious as well as terrible” (97). This strikingly paradoxical view of the beautiful, especially as it relates to the numinous, resonates in the writings of the Inklings. Charles Williams, for instance, points out that while caritas is often likened to “our immediate emotional indulgence,” it should be properly understood in the sense of the “otherness and terror of...
Inspired by the life and legacy of C.S. Lewis, the C.S. Lewis Foundation is dedicated to advancing the renewal of Christian scholarship and artistic expression throughout the mainstream of our colleges and universities, and by extension, the culture at large.
In this spirit, the Foundation offers this online, peer-reviewed journal to stimulate discussion concerning the relationship of Christianity to the academy and the arts.