June 11 2001

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Our culture has a deep hunger for mythology. In the midst of mythical films like Star Wars, mythically inspired card games like Magic: The Gathering, and mythically based video games like Diablo 2, we as Christians have a responsibility to respond to this cultural desire on a mythic level. Lewis knew this. Particularly, he and J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, recognized the deep impact of myth. It was the shared love of Norse mythology that sparked a friendship between Tolkien and Lewis and was perhaps one of the most important steps on Lewis's path to Christianity.

I hope that Christians no longer shun the myriad mythologies throughout history and current culture, but embrace them as the human search for the ultimate factual historical mythology—Christ's life, death, resurrection.

But let's enjoy the stories, the heroic journeys, the "subcreation" (as Tolkien put it), without making them Christian allegories.
Jonathan A. Watson
Arcadia, California

In "Myth Matters," Louis Markos claims that the central goal of New Age thought is to restore "a spiritual focus to a society that generally resists any serious consideration of the supernatural."

Basing an analysis of Lewis's mythos on this assumption leaves out another very spiritual dimension of his program—that is, what he called "macrobes," or demons, whose program is to transform the ...