While Lewis is honored by many Christians (and others) for his imaginative accomplishments, Lewis's own thinking about the nature of the imagination is often neglected. But Lewis believed that the training of the imagination was as important a religious task as the training of the reason. Reason was the organ of truth, imagination the organ of meaning. As he put it, "Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself." Lewis believed that we humans (and the rest of Creation) are so ordered that our perception of reality requires poetic, metaphoric knowledge. So there are some aspects of reality that can only be properly perceived in imaginative form.

"One of the things that Lewis does is to show that the work of imagination is going on all the time around us, and even the people who most strenuously dismiss it are actually using it all the time in order to influence others." So claims Alan Jacobs (left) in this stimulating Conversation with Ken Myers. During their discussion of Lewis's thinking about faith and imagination, a number of Lewis's books come into view, including, The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, The Magician's Nephew, That Hideous Strength, and The Pilgrim's Regress. Jacobs explains why Lewis's brief against modern culture, especially its scientistic and reductionist tendencies, depends on the crucial matter of what it means to imagine. 53 minutes.

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This is one of a series of Conversations produced by MARS HILL AUDIO. Two other titles examine C. S. Lewis's thought and writing: Till We Have Faces and the Meaning of Myth, a conversation with Thomas Howard, and The Heav'ns and All the Powers Therein: The Medieval Cosmos and the World of Narnia, a conversation with Michael Ward. We have also produced an Anthology entitled The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis, which features interviews with Clyde Kilby, Gilbert Meilaender, Michael Aeschliman, and others. You may purchase the "C. S. Lewis Collection" of all three Conversations and the Anthology in one convenient, discounted package. To see a list of other available recordings, see our online catalog. If you like, you may download an free demonstration issue (ZIP, 33.5MB, containing MP3 files) of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, our bimonthly audio magazine.