Into the Wardrobe

I knew of Lewis for a long time and read the Wardrobe when I was in 5th grade..and of course going to public school and all, the Christian side of it was never taught. It was not until high school that I found out he was a Christian author.

And a friend of mine on Christian Connect- http://www.ChristianConnect.com recommended Screwtape Letters which I am reading right now. I love the book and the way Lewis presents the support of Christianity from a satirical view.


My question is, what other Christian authors are recognized by the secular worldview as just being a good writer? I know Tolkien was Catholic but besides those two....and maybe Madaleine L'Engle, I can not think of one single author...which is really sad because I want to be a writer and I feel like I have no one to really admire in my faith (besides two great British guys!) It's just that most of the writers I admire and study: (William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Joyce, etc.) were not Christian....

Also, someone told me that Anne Rice became saved. Is that true?

Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy leap to mind. There are many others, I'm sure.

Rumer Godden is another.

Graham Greene was a Catholic, wasn't he?

Shusaku Endo is an incredible Catholic Christian prose author from Japan. That is, the one book I've read of him, Silence, made me say this. Endo is a very complex yet easy to read writer. I still have to read his other books, yet. :)

An outstanding contemporary Orthodox author - Fr. Alexander Schmemann (died 1983). Some of his works are rather deep, but his diaries (1973-1983) are amazing and a testament to a Christian life lived, not just talked about. How he faced death was, well, if that's Christianity, that's how I want to die.

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983



And for those who can't buy, here's a good brief description:

If you like science fiction/fantasy, one of the greats from the "Golden Era" of pulp science fiction (before my time BTW) who was a Christian is Cordwainer Smith. Very, very creative stories, and like Lewis, a highly intelligent man who came to Christ as an adult. I only recently discovered him, through one of my sons, who discovered a story by him in an old SF anthology from the early 1960s in a used bookstore in NYC! His stories are not quite like anything you probably have read before, and yet, b/c of the Christian worldview that gradually came to shape his understanding, even a strange future is yet being shaped by God after all. (In his books, for example, there are genetically-engineered semi-humans who are part animals - dog men and cat women, etc. - and they are the ones rediscovering the Gospel within a cold, secular culture that denies they have souls.) Cordwainer Smith was a pen name for a man who worked in the U.S. State Dept. and in military intelligence!


A living writer in the SF realm who deals with issues of faith and why does a good God let people suffer is Mary Doria Russell. She was raised Catholic, became an atheist, and later came back to faith in God through Judaism. After a career in biology, in midlife she turned to writing novels, three so far: The Sparrow, Children of God and A Thread of Grace. Very good books, although not for children. I grew up in Chicago and lived in Puerto Rico (two of the settings for The Sparrow) and she gets the little details right really well. Her conceptions of an alien ecosystem are also carefully thought out scientifically and very plausible to a biologist. And the core conflict in The Sparrow, a situation somewhat like Job, but not quite (I don't want to give away any details) is powerfully done.


Recent Russian literature, of course, has Alexander Solzhenitzyn, a giant; the turning point that gave him faith to commit himself to devote his life to documenting the evils of Marxism was when he became a Christian while in prison camp, through an Orthodox priest of Jewish ancestry. Before the fall of Communism, he had to veil some of his convictions, but he still managed to get them into his novels, such as the vibrant Baptist in the prison camp in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.


Sadly, I would say that the greatest spiritual vacuum in fictional literature right now may be the absence of strong Christian writers in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds. There are many "spiritual" writers, with a mix of magic and realism like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende, but I don't know of any recent Spanish writers who are strong Christians of whatever kind of background. Do any of you? For example, Garcia Marquez is such a gifted writer, yet the universe he writes about in his novels is perverse and chaotic, supernatural, but there doesn't seem to be any sovereign and just God who ultimately controls it. All his novels that I've read seem to be permeated with despair. Perhaps we should pray that God gives the Spanish-speaking world (and the rest of us through them) a Christian with writing gifts like CSL!

Aye, Anne Rice is a Christian now.

Some of Frank Peretti's books are popular outside the church and I'm amazed at how many nonChristians have read the Left Behind series. And Martin Bell has been popular outside the church.

An adventure writer, James Byron Huggins is very approachable to nonChristians.