"The Language of Joy": C.S. Lewis’s Legacy as a Christian Communicator to Contemporary Culture

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Published: Dec 12, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2019-2-0151
Keywords:
Apologist Imaginative Storyteller Culture Joy Beauty Love

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Monika Hilder
Trinity Western University, Canada

Abstract

In this paper, I explore C.S. Lewis’s legacy as apologist and artist of the Christian faith and claim that Lewis, like his mentor George MacDonald before him and his friend Dorothy L. Sayers, successfully engaged contemporary culture by speaking the wildly attractive language of Joy. Both as rational defender of the Christian faith and as an imaginative storyteller, Lewis conveyed this quality of Heavenly Joy that invites and inspires the hearts and minds of readers to rethink, reconsider, and perhaps for the first time in their lives experience Beauty and Love—to truly encounter what proves to be the lasting Hope of the world. In this I point to three characteristics that resulted in Lewis’s success as a Christian apologist: 1) the recovery of earlier ideas; 2) the use of everyday language; and 3) the habit of humility. Then I speak of how in his imaginative fiction this language of Joy sees Beauty and both testify to Love—and it is these literary experiences that move the hearts and minds of readers.

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Hilder, M. “‘The Language of Joy’: C.S. Lewis’s Legacy As a Christian Communicator to Contemporary Culture”. Linguaculture, vol. 10, no. 2, Dec. 2019, pp. 141-56, doi:10.47743/lincu-2019-2-0151.
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Vol. 10 No. 2 (2019)
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Monika Hilder, Trinity Western University, Canada

Monika Hilder is Professor of English at Trinity Western University, co-founder and co-director of Inklings Institute of Canada, and has published a 3-volume study of C.S. Lewis and gender, including Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C.S. Lewis and Gender (2013).

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