Lewis, C.S. Christian Reunion and Other Essays. Ed. and Preface Walter Hooper. London: Collins, Fount Paperbacks, 1990. 113 pp. ISBN 0-00-627494-3.

Reviewed by Nancy-Lou Patterson

[This review originally appeared as “Surviving Leaves” in Mythlore 18.2 (#68) (1992): 39.]

This extremely thin volume contains the last scraps from God in the Dock (1970), also published as Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1971); one major essay, “Lilies That Fester,” first collected in The World’s Last Night (1959), the only collection of Lewis essays published in his lifetime; and one five page work published for the first time, which Walter Hooper has accompanied by five additional pages of exposition in the Introduction. This work, “Christian Reunion,” of which Hooper tells us that “it is written on the back of a few surviving leaves of ‘Mere Christianity’ broadcast given over the BBC in 1944,” and that “when it was discovered after Lewis’s death in 1963, it was set aside by his estate,” seems to me to be minor at best, although its interest for Hooper, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism, is understandable. A better view, visible through example, of Lewis’s way of addressing fellow Christians who happen to be Roman Catholics, can be found in Lewis’s Letters to Don Giovanni Calabria. I note in conclusion that the first page of Christian Reunion (the volume, not the essay) devotes ten lines to telling its readers about C.S. Lewis, followed by ten lines telling them about Walter Hooper.