Thursday, March 31, 7:00pm
University of Chicago, Location TBA
Carol & Philip Zaleski (Smith College)
cosponsored by the Seminary Co-op Bookstore
The literary historian, novelist and critic C. S. Lewis is the most widely read Christian writer of his century and ours; the philologist J.R.R. Tolkien our most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates (including the philosopher of language Owen Barfield and the eccentric fantasist Charles Williams) formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis’s Magdalen College rooms and nearby Oxford pubs. They read aloud works in progress, drank, argued, and encouraged one another to write the kind of books they loved to read — even if it meant bucking modernist trends. Philip and Carol Zaleski, co-authors of The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, will present the literary and spiritual project of the Inklings as one of recovery rather than reaction: recovery of the living tradition of Christian humanism in the face of war, environmental degradation, and secular indifference.