People often describe C. S. Lewis as the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century. And he clearly deserves such a title, since Lewis provided the groundwork for many thoughtful Christians for why the Christian faith not only remains intellectually credible but also provides the best vantage point for seeing and understanding our world today. This is certainly one of the main reasons for explaining the very strange phenomenon of an author selling many more copies of such works as Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Four Loves today than during the author’s own lifetime. Since HarperCollins, Lewis’s publisher in both the United States and the United Kingdom, is celebrating its two-hundredth anniversary in 2017, we can say very confidently that Lewis’s growing and continued popularity is very rare indeed.
But being a leading Christian defender of the faith would not be the only reason to explain Lewis’s posthumous popularity. Like Lewis’s contemporary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lewis was also a pioneering explainer of the Christian life itself. In fact, I believe that Lewis’s apologetics are so powerful precisely because many find his vision of the Christian life so compelling and inspiring.
It is this latter role of Lewis’s, as a visionary prophet for how to follow Christ today, that this collection is concerned with. In many Christian traditions, the period before Easter is seen as a time of spiritual preparation for the day we later celebrate and welcome the “grand miracle” Christ accomplished through the cross. In these anticipatory days, often called Lent, many Christians choose the spiritual discipline of reading a devotional work each morning to help keep their focus on God. In Preparing for Easter, we have put together fifty readings from a broad swath of Lewis’s works, many of which come from books and essays that few people encounter but which still embody Lewis’s characteristic wisdom, for just this purpose.
The selections come to us from the skilled editorial eye of Zachry Kincaid, the Lewis expert who edits the popular blog on our website CSLewis.com. We hope you enjoy these selections and that they help you, as Lewis would say, go “further up and further in” to the world God invites us to enter.
MICHAEL G. MAUDLIN
Senior Vice President and Executive Editor
HarperOne, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers