Book Review: Mere Christians

[JimB]

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Mere Christians
Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C.S. Lewis​

Mary A. Phemister & Andrew Lazo
(Baker Books, $16p, 222pgs)

Last week I realized a lifelong dream. I sat in the Oxford pub, in the very nook, where my spiritual mentor C.S. Lewis sat every Tuesday during term for nearly twenty years with colleagues like J.R.R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield to sip a brandy and talk about heady things from literature to philosophy, from science to theology. For that one very brief moment I felt, well, intellectual. Just being in that room was a stimulating experience. Later that day I dropped by the legendary Blackwell Bookshop with its 2½ miles of bookshelves and browsed through a section devoted to Lewis where I chanced across Mary Ann Phemister and Andrew Lazo’s book, “Mere Christians: Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C.S. Lewis,” a volume I spent the rest of our vacation thumbing through.

“Mere Christians” is a collection of fifty-five short essays, eulogies of sorts, written by people whose lives have been touched by this remarkable, a thinker whom many consider the most influential Christian of the twentieth century, yet a man who seldom traveled outside the confines of Oxford but whose writings have shaped the lives of thousands, perhaps millions around the world.

Included among the contributors are such well-known authors as Philip Yancey, Liz Curtis Higgs, and Ann Rice; Christian leaders such as Elton Trueblood, Charles Colson, and George Gallup are among the list with a host of lesser-known scholars and schoolteachers, computer technicians and actresses, singers and salesmen, each giving witness to the persuasiveness of the great don’s watertight logic and powers of communication. The essays titles tell the story: “Lewis Opened My Eyes,” “He Saved My Dying Faith,” “I Became a Believer,” “Depths I Had Never Dreamed,” “From Atheism to Belief,” “Coming to Faith by Way of Mars” via “Perelandra&#8221, “He Shaped My Mind,” “He Turned the Intellectual Tables,” “My Shadow Mentor.”

I found one entry especially ironic. In Jusice Carmon’s essay he describes his bitterness after the death of his mother, mentioning some of the distractions with which he tried to "salve the wounds” incurred in the wake. Interestingly, among those distractions before he encountered Lewis, was the work of novelist Anne Rice, whose well-known horror series “The Vampire Chronicles” describe the "dark, iconoclastic vampire, Lestat, living life as an immortal sans deity.” This is interesting because Anne Rice herself is another of the contributors to “Mere Christians.” An atheist until 1998, Rice has since returned to the church and refuses to write any more vampire novels. "I would never go back," she declares, "not even if they say, 'You will be financially ruined; you've got to write another Vampire book.” Her essay, "I Look to Lewis All the Time,' cites “Mere Christianity” as a "brilliant and affirming book,” a compelling influence in her returning to Christ.

Lewis, who once said that he did not believe his work would last beyond his death, would be pleased that so many have found and are still finding the Christ he loved through his writings which have not only survived but thrived since his death nearly fifty years ago.

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Author’s bio

Mary Anne Phemister is a nurse, author, mother, grandmother, and wife of noted concert pianist Bill Phemister. She was born in China and grew up in two boarding schools overseas, then attended a Christian boarding school in Florida.
After taking pre-Nursing courses at Houghton College in New York, she attended Columbia University School of Nursing where she received her BSN. It was later in Paris during her husband's sabbatical in 1984, that she took classes in massage therapy. In 1985, she established Wheaton Massage Therapy and grew it into a thriving business. She sold the business in 2000 and now spends her time writing and volunteering at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center. The Wade Center is a research institution devoted to the work of seven British authors including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
She is also the editor of, and a contributor to, Mere Christians: Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C.S. Lewis which contains narratives of how Lewis' readers have been profoundly affected by his work.

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Andrew Lazo holds an M.A. in English from Rice University, where he was Jacob K. Javits Fellow in the Humanities, and a B.A. in English (with Honors) from the University of California, Davis. He also teaches Mythology at the University of Houston. Andrew has published several articles and book reviews on C. S. Lewis and other Inklings and is co-editor of Changed Lives: C. S. Lewis as Spiritual Mentor, forthcoming on Baker Books. A nationally-known speaker on the Inklings, Andrew speaks regularly in churches and schools and at events for the C. S. Lewis Foundation. He is currently working on two book projects, one unlocking the mysteries of Till We Have Faces and the other doing primary research on Friendship in the Coalbiters, Tolkien’s Old Norse reading group.