The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis's Journey to Faith

David C. Downing

Mey 2021 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

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In his teens, a young man wrote, “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them.” After serving in the trenches of WW1, the same young man said, “I never sank so low as to pray.” To a religious friend, he wrote impatiently, “You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!” This young man was C. S. Lewis, the “foul-mouthed atheist” who would become one of the most eloquent Christian writers of the twentieth century.

David C. Downing offers a unique look at Lewis’s personal journey to faith and the profound influence it had on his life as a writer and eventual follower of Christ. This is the first book to focus on the period from Lewis’s childhood to his early thirties, a tumultuous journey of spiritual and intellectual exploration. It was not despite this journey but precisely because of it that Lewis understood the search for life’s meaning so well.

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David C. Downing is Co-director (with his wife Crystal) of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois. His other books on C. S. Lewis include Planets in Peril, a critical study of the Space trilogy; Into the Wardrobe, an overview of the Narnia Chronicles; Into the Region of Awe, a study of how Lewis's wide reading in Christian mysticism enriched his own faith and imaginative writings; and Looking for the King, a novel in which two young Americans meet Lewis and Tolkien in Oxford.