Readers and fans of C.S. Lewis should be skeptical of Brenton Dickieson's claim in The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis (OUP, 2026) that he has found a secret thread woven into the fabric of Lewis's tapestry of spiritual life. For one thing, there have been strange theories about Lewis's writings before. For another thing, is there any evidence that Dr. Dickieson has any weaving experience at all?

In this special session, Brenton defends his claim by sharing an experiment that can test whether it works. In fact, it is C.S. Lewis himself who designed the experiment. Lewis asks us to imagine the manuscript of a classic novel or a great symphony. Someone claims to have found a “missing passage which is really the centre of the whole work.” "The only thing you could do," Lewis argues, "would be to put this new piece of the manuscript in that central position, and then see how it reacted on the whole of the rest of the work. If it constantly brought out new meanings from the whole of the rest of the work, if it made you notice things in the rest of the work which you had not noticed before, then I think you would decide that it was authentic."

Dr. Dickieson lays out the rules of this experiment so that you can decide whether he is a fraud or whether it might be worth taking the whole class.