Lewis’s approach to culture, specifically the arts, flies in the face of a lot of what’s going on in Christian thinking, both on popular and intellectual fronts. On the popular front, are well meaning Christians who accept he model of “culture war”, and on the intellectual front, is an emphasis on “worldview” theory- analyzing the worldviews behind artistic texts to point out their hidden assumptions or to mine their truth value. And while these strategies may have their place, Lewis would look at what evangelicals have been doing in the arts for the last forty years and, for the most part, tell us we’ve been doing it all wrong – that we’ve failed to understand what art is really for.
Charlie Starr
Charlie Starr is a professor of English and Humanities at Kentucky Christian University. He took an MA in Humanities at the University of Dallas under Louise Cowan and finished his DA in English at Middle Tennessee State Univeristy with the dissertation, The Triple Enigma: Fact, Truth and Myth as the Key to C.S. Lewis’ Epistemological Thinking. Charlie has published three books, most recently a biblical study entitled Honest to God. His essay, “The Silver Chair and the Silver Screen” is the lead chapter in Revisiting Narnia and he has published on C.S. Lewis in Seven, C.S.L and Mythlore.
