With book sales exceeding 200 million copies, a billion-dollar film industry, and a bookshelf of critical, philosophical, and popular works, C.S. Lewis is at once the beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia and a leading public figure.

While Narnia is sometimes miscategorized as Narnia or Lewis caricatured as just an apologist, this Oxford don thought that meaning was bound up in the reading experience. Given the distortions of his public image, it is hard to see how the same Lewis could be a literary scholar, voice of faith on the BBC, and creator of Narnia.

In The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis (2026), Brenton Dickieson uncovers a secret thread woven into Lewis’s spiritual tapestry. This Signum SPACE class follows this thread by focusing primarily on Narnia and his personal writings. Together, we will discover that the shape of Lewis’s imagination invites a hopeful, transformative invitation to spiritual life.

Key topics covered in this module include:

• The Secret Thread and the Lost Manuscript
• Standing on the Shoulders of Giants and Mice: Tool-shed Cracks, Seeing Like Lucy, and Uncle Andrew’s Lesson in Epistemology
• Mental Maps and the Cartography of the Soul
• “Slow-paced I come, Yielding by inches”: Lewis’s Conversion in His Spiritual Imagination
• The Shape of the Cross: Heaven’s Front Lawn, Love that is not Love, and the Undragoning of Eustace
• Eucatastrophe and the Fairy-Tale Form
• A Brief Study in Black and Scarlet
• The Upsidedownedness of Childlike Wonder, or What We Learn from Absurdly Solemn Literary Puritans
• “As High as My Spirit, As Small as My Stature”: C.S. Lewis’s Theology of the Small (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)
• Sacred Paradoxes in Lewis’s Spiritual Imagination
• Going Out Beyond the Edges: How Lewis Embiggens our Spiritual Imaginations