I don’t have the goal… not a conscious goal, anyway… of turning this into The Southern Guy Who’s Obsessed With C.S. Lewis blog. He’s my favorite writer, though, and Disney is releasing a film based on his best known book later this year… so these things are going to happen from time to time.

Here’s an interesting tidbit on Disney’s marketing of said film:

The entertainment giant, which bills itself as a "Magic Kingdom," has carefully avoided religion for most of its history. Yet Disney has launched a 10-month campaign aimed at evangelical Christians to build support for "Narnia," a $100 million, live-action and computer-generated animation feature it is co-producing with Walden Media.

Disney has hired several Christian marketing groups to handle the film, including Motive Marketing, which ran the historic grass-roots efforts for "The Passion." That film has grossed $611 million worldwide and is now in rerelease.

"From a marketing point of view, it could be a marriage made in heaven -- if the movie is any good," said Adele Reinhartz, professor of religion at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Armand Nicholi, who for decades has taught a Harvard University seminar on C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, agrees. The entertainment world realizes there's a big audience "that embraces a spiritual worldview," he said. How well these groups interact "will determine how successful this marriage is."

"…The departure of the prickly, anti-Christian Michael Eisner and the advent of the 'Narnia' project might open lines that could lead to a new understanding," (Bob Knight) said. "Political realities are catching up to Disney as well, as wiggle room disappears in the culture war."

I also noticed this mention of Lewis’s name with regard to the Terri Schiavo case:

Years ago, Christian scholar C.S. Lewis noted this dichotomy in the 1940s. In an essay titled “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis describes conflict between advocates of natural law or universal moral codes and relativists such as Friedrich Nietzsche.

Because the relativists don’t believe in any sort of objective truth, Lewis reasoned, they foster tyranny. In his view, relativists changed the question from “Which policy is more just?” to “Which group has the most power to impose its will on society?”

I can’t say much about Nietzsche, but I’d bet that C.S. Lewis’s take on Terri Schiavo’s condition would have been pretty much as noted above. (Read Lewis's amazing, life changing Mere Christianity for more along those lines.)

And by the way, the latest Zogby Poll indicates that the average American wasn’t as gung-ho to unplug Terri’s feeding tube as the major media outlets might have you think:

"If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water," the poll asked.

A whopping 79 percent said the patient should not have food and water taken away while just 9 percent said yes.

Anyway, back to Lewis:

A few days ago I posted an entry noting that I was reading Till We Have Faces, and that half-way through it, it was already a mind-blowing book. I finished it the day after I wrote that, and the end of the book was as good or better than the beginning. I’d feel safe saying that I have a new favorite work of fiction. The book, by the way, would make a wonderful movie in the right hands.

I won’t get my hopes up.