This month’s mailing for the InterVarsity Press Book Club arrived with two familiar names on the cover: the featured Main Selection this month (there’s another one as well) is Is Your Lord Large Enough?: How C. S. Lewis Expands Our View of God, by Dr. Peter Schakel. Lewis’ name, of course, is familiar to many; Dr. Schakel’s name is less so, but in the world of C. S. Lewis scholarship, he’s an important contributor. Walter Hooper, in a blurb on this book, calls him “the wisest and humblest of C. S. Lewis’s commentators,” and I think that’s a fair assessment. Of course, I’m biased in this matter. I majored in English at Hope College, where Dr. Schakel is Cook Professor of English (and chaired the department during my time there), and in addition had him as my Sunday school teacher for a while; in that time, I came to have a very high opinion of him, both as a professor and as a godly man, and to hold him in great affection and esteem. That said, I think my opinion is accurate; I’ve valued other things he’s written (a list which includes Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis: Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces, The Way into Narnia: A Reader’s Guide, and, among other textbooks, Approaching Poetry: Perspectives and Responses, co-written with Jack Ridl), and I look forward to reading this one. It’s certainly a worthwhile topic; most of us have the tendency to let our view of God shrink, and there are few people better than C. S. Lewis to help us correct that tendency.
