Description
Years before he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis published another fantastical fiction series: the Ransom Trilogy. Yet these three novels – Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength – have never enjoyed the same widespread popularity as Narnia or any of Lewis’s apologetical works, whether in mainstream culture or among Christians.
However, as the twenty-first century unfolds, readers are rediscovering the Ransom Trilogy as a vital and prophetic work for our cultural moment. Life on the Silent Planet is a groundreaking collection of essays, bringing together an accomplished group of scholars and writers to discover and apply the insights of these novels to Christian living, particularly focussing on the unique vices and challenges of modernity. Fraught topics such as gender, contraception, bureaucracy, and transhumanism, often overlooked or shied away from in contemporary Christian teaching, were diagnosed and anticipated by Lewis with startling clarity in the 1930s and 40s. This volume seeks to bring these insights, woven into the rich imaginative world of the Ransom Trilogy, to bear upon the realities of the Christian life, enabling Christians to think deeply, live faithfully, and tune themselves again to the music of what Lewis called “the Great Dance” of creation.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Discarded Lewis
Rhys Laverty
A Note on the Text
OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET
Which Way, Weston Man?: Good, Evil, and Cosmological Models in Out of the Silent Planet
Louis Markos
The Education of Dr. Ransom: First Steps from Pedestrian to Pendragon
Joe Rigney
Men Are From Mars: Masculinity in Out of the Silent Planet
Colin Smothers
PERELANDRA
Enjoyment and Contemplation: The Green Lady, Self-Knowledge, and Growth in Maturity
Christiana Hale
The Devil Went Down to Venus: Lessons from the Un-man
Bethel McGrew
A Taste of Paradise: Naming, Restraining, and Embracing Pleasure on Perelandra
Rhys Laverty
THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH
Selling the Well and the Wood: That Hideous Strength and the Abolition of Matrimony
Michael Ward
Lewis’s Apocalypse and Ours
Joseph Minich
The Untabled Law of Nature
Colin Redemer
Arthur in Edgestow
Holly Ordway
The Problem of Jane
Susannah Black-Roberts
Bureaucratic Speech in That Hideous Strength
Jake Meador
About the EDITOR
Rhys Laverty is the Senior Managing Editor of the Davenant Press, Senior Editor of Ad Fontes, and Communications Director for the Davenant Institute. His writing has been published in The Spectator, The Critic, Plough Quarterly, Ad Fontes, Mere Orthodoxy, Theopolis, and WORLD, as well as on his Substack, The New Albion.