C. S. Lewis

Born: November 29, 1898

Died: November 22, 1963

Born in Belfast in 1898 (he always saw himself as Irish), Clive Staples Lewis taught at Oxford and Cambridge in medieval and renaissance English. He belonged to the informal literary society known as the Inklings, which included The Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien. Though many know him only through his fiction, Lewis also wrote poems, essays, and works of Christian apologetics.

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance,” he wrote, “and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” This was something Lewis had to learn. Though raised as a nominal Christian, he soon lost whatever faith he had and spent his young adulthood finding a path back to God. Through the encouragement of close friends such as Tolkien, a Catholic, Lewis found the God “whom I so earnestly desired not to meet,” converting to Anglicanism in 1931.

This lost-and-found approach to God allowed him to view the faith from a long ways off, giving him a very broad view of Christianity as a whole. Lewis called his great work of apologetics Mere Christianity, in which he strongly argues for a compellingly essential Christianity that could be supported by Catholic and Protestant alike.

—James P. Cahill