Life on the Silent Planet
Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy
edited By rhys laverty
$44.95
Publication Date: November 14, 2024
About this book
thulcandra is the world we do not know
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.
Paperback | xxv + 340 pp. | 6 x 9 | PubliSHed november 14, 2024 | ISBN 978-1-949716-25-2
If you are interested in a bulk order please contact [email protected].
From the Book
“The damage wrought by this current zeitgeist around technology and gender is becoming more and more evident. And it is for this reason that we find ourselves in a “moment” in which the Ransom Trilogy has truly come into its own. Upon first discovering the trilogy a few years ago, I was simply floored on page after page after page by its prescience, and scandalized that no one had thrust it into my hands with urgency sooner. One could scarcely have designed a more retroactively prophetic set of novels for our day if they had tried. The unashamed aim of Life on the Silent Planet is to bring Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy into popular discussion about Christian living such that it gains its rightful place as the equal of the Chronicles of Narnia and Lewis’s most famous Christian non-fiction.”
“With the passing of the years Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy proves itself to be more profound and prescient than even his most devoted readers had guessed. Perhaps, in time, it will be prized even more than the Chronicles of Narnia, or his apologetics. This is a marvelous collection of essays on the trilogy, several of them written by friends. I’ll return to this book many times in the coming years. Read it and you will too.”
– C.R. WILEY, Author of In the House of Tom Bombadil and The Household and the War for the Cosmos
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.
Praise for this work
“For years, careful readers have come to rely on the thoughtful excellence of anything under the Davenant imprint; Life on the Silent Planet only adds to that well-deserved reputation. As editor and contributor Rhys Laverty intriguingly suggests, Lewis’s foray into science fiction offers more than a flight of fantasy; the contributions to this critical collection of essays make clear in many ways that C. S. Lewis’s prescient and prophetic voice still speaks, all the more in our age. Its compelling combination of established experts such as Michael Ward and Holly Ordway alongside wise and emerging voices commends the deeply engaging Life on the Silent Planet to anyone who would think more clearly about the Ransom Trilogy and about Lewis himself.”
– ANDREW LAZO
Co-editor, Mere Christians: Inspiring Encounters with C.S. Lewis
“This book opened up the Ransom Trilogy to me like no other. With a section of essays on each book in the trilogy, the authors provide new insights on almost every page, especially Lewis’s ideas on masculinity, femininity, and marriage, which our world desperately needs to heed, but also Lewis on pleasure, the Un-Man, Merlin, Bragdon Wood, the Law of Nature, the Pendragon, and many others. If you read only one book on Lewis this year, read this one.”
– JOEL HECK
Concordia Lutheran Seminary
“If there remains an undiscovered country of Lewis’s writings, for many it is the world of his Ransom Trilogy. Life on the Silent Planet provides readers with a collection of helpful roadmaps and knowledgeable traveling companions. Lewis fans—both novice and experienced—will find valuable insights, useful background information, and clear applications to their own lives and times.”
– DEVIN BROWN
Professor of English, Asbury University and author of A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis
“What sets this book apart is the way it provides thoughtful application of Lewis’s ideas to the Christian life while at the same time accessing the very best of Lewis scholarship. This is no mean achievement, and the result is a book I’ve been longing for: substantial insight into the Christian life grounded in a serious and nuanced understanding of Lewis’s work. I devoured it, and I will return to it again and again. This book is a gift to thoughtful Christians. “
– DIANA PAVLAC GLYER
Azusa Pacific University and co-editor of A Compass for Deep Heaven: Navigating the C.S. Lewis Ransom Trilogy
“With the passing of the years Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy proves itself to be more profound and prescient than even his most devoted readers had guessed. Perhaps, in time, it will be prized even more than the Chronicles of Narnia, or his apologetics. This is a marvelous collection of essays on the trilogy, several of them written by friends. I’ll return to this book many times in the coming years. Read it and you will too.”
– C.R. Wiley
Author of In the House of Tom Bombadil and The Household and the War for the Cosmos
“I get to speak to lots of Christian audiences about C. S. Lewis. If I ask how many of the attendees have read at least one of the Chronicles of Narnia, practically every hand in the room will go up. If I ask who has read at least one volume of the Ransom trilogy, I get only a bare scattering of hands, if any at all. Only the most diehard Lewisians are still reading the planetary series. The editor and contributors to Life on the Silent Planet think this is a tragedy, and they want to change it by convincing us that the books are both good fiction and piercingly relevant, indeed, a more “retroactively prophetic set of novels for our day” than anyone could have written if they had tried.
They face a challenge in doing so. How do you get someone to read a whole book whose purpose is to convince him to read three other books? Well, you can entice him with the name of Lewis and the promise of relevance to Christian living. The initial essays, on Out of the Silent Planet, are heavy on summary and paraphrase, not assuming familiarity, but with enough insight to serve as an appetizer. Then, assuming that the reader is hooked, the later essays on Perelandra and That Hideous Strength focus more on analysis. They have some good analysis too, e.g. on what it means to be human (Bethel McGrew) or on what makes a paradise a paradise (Rhys Laverty). Michael Ward does one of his typical schemas that just keeps on generating insight despite its seeming simplicity: Book one (Mars) is about the masculine, book two (Venus) the feminine, which leads to book three combining them and being about matrimony. That one essay justifies the “retroactively prophetic” claim all by itself.
In short, these folks have made as good a case for renewed interest in the Ransom books as could have been made. The world will be a better place to the extent that they succeed.”
– DONALD T. WILLIAMS
Professor Emeritus, Toccoa Falls College
“As our world is ever more confused about gender and drinks more deeply from the well of AI and transhumanism, C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy become more and more prescient. This is a fascinating collection of insightful, readable essays from experts who have thought long and hard about what a silent planet needs to hear loud and clear.”
– JAMES CARY
Sitcom writer, co-host of Cooper & Cary Have Words, author of The Sacred Art of Joking and The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer
“Joe Rigney says that the book club, in which an invested community reads sections aloud and shares comments along the way, is the best method for teaching C.S. Lewis. This collection of essays comes as close as it can to providing the book club experience in text as an array of Lewis enthusiasts come together to provide different angles of insight into Lewis’s underappreciated Ransom series. Each of the contributors plays a significant role in calling us out of the “space” of the modern age and into the substance of the heavens. With this substance, we too are called to be substantial in our engagement with the present and with our aims for the future.”
– ANDREW SNYDER
Host of the Mythic Mind Podcast
“It is a joy to see Lewis’s prophetic Ransom Trilogy receiving the heightened attention and reflection it has always deserved in such an excellent volume. If Lewis’s books open up the beauties of creation and the heavens for readers with eyes to see, the authors’ insights here open up the trilogy itself for the deeper appreciation and understanding of fresh readers and longstanding admirers alike.”
– PHILIP BUNN
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Covenant College
About the CONTRIBUTORS
Susannah Black-Roberts is a senior editor of Plough Quarterly and has written for publications including First Things, Fare Forward, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, and The American Conservative. She is the editor, with Anne Snyder, of Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year.
Christiana Hale teaches English and Latin at Logos School in Moscow, Idaho. She is the author of Deeper Heaven: A Reader’s Guide to C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy.
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.
Louis Markos (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a professor of English and humanities at Houston Christian University. He is an authority on C. S. Lewis, apologetics, and ancient Greece and Rome and who lectures widely for classical Christian and classical charter schools and conferences, is the author of twenty-five books On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis, C. S. Lewis for Beginners, Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis,and Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World.
Bethel McGrew (Ph.D, Western Michigan University) is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in First Things, National Review, The Spectator, WORLD, and many other outlets, covering social criticism, literature, film, music, and history. Her Substack, Further Up, is one of the top paid newsletters in “Faith & Spirituality” on the platform. She has also contributed to two essay anthologies on Jordan Peterson.
Jake Meador is the Editor-in-Chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is the author of In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World and What Are Christians For? Life Together at the End of the World. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, Christianity Today, Fare Forward, the University Bookman, Books & Culture, First Things, National Review, Front Porch Republic, and The Run of Play.
Joseph Minich (Ph.D, The University of Texas at Dallas) is a Teaching Fellow at The Davenant Institute in Landrum, South Carolina. He is the author of Enduring Divine Absence: The Challenge of Modern Atheism and Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, the editor of several works with The Davenant Press, as well as the founding editor of Ad Fontes. He is also a host of The Pilgrim Faith Podcast.
Holly Ordway (Ph.D, University of Massachusetts Amherst) is the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the the Word on Fire Institute, Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University, and a Subject Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies. She is the author of Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages and Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography.
Colin Redemer (Ph.D candidate, University of Aberdeen) is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California, Managing Director at Beck & Stone, and Director of Education at American Reformer. He previously served as Vice President of The Davenant Institute. He has edited and modernised two volumes of Thomas Traherne’s Christian Ethics and his writing has been widely published in various outlets.
Joe Rigney (Ph.D, University of Chester) serves as Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College. He is the author of seven books including Live Like a Narnian: Christian Discipleship in Lewis’s Chronicles and Lewis on the Christian Life: Becoming Truly Human in the Presence of God. Previously, Joe served as a professor and president of Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minneapolis, a pastor at Cities Church in St. Paul, and a teacher at Desiring God.
Colin Smothers (Ph.D, Southern Baptist Seminary) serves as Executive Director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is the author of In Your Mouth and Your Heart: A Study of Deuteronomy 30:12-14 in Paul’s Letters to the Romans in Canonical Context and Male and Female He Created Them: A Study on Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage (with Denny Burk and David Closson).
Michael Ward (Ph.D, University of St. Andrew’s) is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the award-winning and best-selling Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis and of After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis.
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