The worldwide interest in Lewis’s Narnia series highlights the positive impact that stories have for many Christians today. British Romantics such as S.T. Coleridge rehabilitated a theological understanding of the imagination, naming it a “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation.” Lewis draws on Romantic conceptions of imagination and the symbol to indicate the relationship between the material and spiritual in the world. Recovering Lewis’s appeal to Romantic views of knowledge reveals how embodied liturgical acts sustain Christian community.

This is the third of three lectures in the 2023 Hansen Lectureship series "C.S. Lewis and the Romantic Imagination," by Jeffrey Barbeau, Professor of Theology at Wheaton College. The Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship is an annual faculty lecture series named in honor of former Wheaton College trustee Ken Hansen and his wife Jean, and endowed in their memory by son Walter and Darlene Hansen.

The faculty respondent is Keith Johnson, Professor of Theology.

The lecture took place on March 23, 2023. Wade Center call number: CSL-Y / VR-160.