Who can count all the ways that books happen to us? There certainly isn’t a single pathway of discovery when it comes to the books that occupy not just our shelves but also our hearts and minds. This book, Mark Noll’s C.S. Lewis in America: Readings and Receptions, 1935-1947, came in the mail from the publisher (IVP Academic) with no note about who sent it and no sense of what they wanted me to do with it. As I am interested in what we call the “reception history” of Lewis’ work—and I have a general understanding of what one does with books—I thought it was most natural that I read it.

C.S. Lewis in America comes out of the Hansen lecture series at the Marion E. Wade Centre on the campus of Wheaton College. A couple of years ago, I reviewed an earlier version of these lectures, published as Splendour in the Dark: C.S. Lewis’s Dymer in His Life and Work (IVP Academic, 2020). In that volume, David C. Downing created a new annotated version of Lewis’s mid-1920s epic narrative poem, Dymer, and Jerry Root supplied the initial lecture series. Following each of the three lectures, a scholar of Interest responds—not just creating a debate but something like call and response, where the scholars tee up fresh ideas from their various perspectives and specialties.

C.S. Lewis in America: Readings and Receptions, 1935-1947 follows the same pattern with three movements:

1. “Surprise: Roman Catholics as Lewis’s First and Most Appreciative Readers” (with a response by Karen J. Johnson, an expert on religion and race)
2. “‘Like a Fresh Wind’: Reception in Secular Mainstream Media” (with a response by Kirk D. Farney, an historian with an interest in ministry and media)
3. “Protestants Also Approve (But Evangelicals Only Slowly)” (with a response by Amy E. Black, a researcher on religion and American politics)

Naturally, there is no Lewis annotation, but an appendix includes two critical articles by Charles Brady from 1944—including one that I was unsuccessful in finding when I first looked for it a decade ago.

Though he is probably most well-known for The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), Mark Noll is an historian who—like George Marsden—helps us discern the rapidly evolving shape of America’s religious history. The three lecture/chapter titles give a clear outline of the topic as he focuses on the ways that American scholars, theologians, journalists, and critics read and reviewed Lewis’ books from the first American editions in the mid-1930s until the point that he landed on the cover of Time Magazine in 1947.

In each lecture/chapter, Noll uses that reception history to discuss critical features of three historical moments:

1. American Roman Catholicism as it strove to escape isolationism, deepen its roots in American theological and intellectual culture, and grapple with rapidly changing cultures of race and class around them
2. Mainstream American intellectual, literary, and media cultures as they negotiated traditional popular respect for religion with emerging secular thought and the crises of the Great Depression, war, and technological change
3. Mid-20^th-century Protestantism in these same radical social changes, with Liberal and Mainstream thinkers responding critically and often positively to Lewis, while the movement that would become Evangelicalism was far more tentative about bringing Lewis into their faith conversations

Honestly, in a busy period where it has been hard to focus my mind well, I really enjoyed just sitting down and reading this book. I put my pencil away and read leisurely, trying to find time to read each lecture and the response when I knew I had space to think about the whole.

And while this piece of mail was a surprise, I knew the book was going to land on shelves eventually. I no longer remember how Mark Noll and I connected, though I think it was a Regent College (Vancouver) event, where he is now Research Professor of History and where I have done some online teaching in spiritual theology. In any case, we got talking and found we shared an interest in historical materials on C.S. Lewis that don’t appear in the places we might expect them.

In this desire to dig into the past, though, I am merely an amateur. Mark and Maggie Noll—the husband and wife team—partnered for a deep dive into every single review and response to Lewis’s writing that they could find in American papers, magazines, and journals in the period (1933-47). An earlier review of findings appeared as “C.S. Lewis in America, 1933-1943” in The Undiscovered C. S. Lewis: Essays in Memory of Christopher W. Mitchell, edited by Bruce Johnson. Although the analysis in this earlier article and the new book is relatively short, the spreadsheet behind these materials represents years of work.

C.S. Lewis in America, then, provides researchers with the leads they need to approach questions of Lewis and American culture in broad terms, and the particular questions of Roman Catholic social culture, American secular thought, Mainstream Protestant theological development, the birth of Evangelicalism, and the remarkable story of how in America Lewis becomes a media superstar, a scholar of note, and the imaginative saint next door. For the reader and researcher of Lewis’s thought, Noll introduces dozens of thoughtful responses to his work that are usually unknown to most of us.

So, although I kept the pencil tucked firmly behind my ear while reading this book, it really is one that is meant to be marked up and to prepare the way for others to do their own work. I don’t know who sent me this book and certainly did not contribute anything to its creation, but I am appreciative of the discovery. It’s been a good year for literary postal surprises, as I noted in a recent response to Amy Baik Lee’s Homeward Ache. Perhaps I should take a walk to the corner and see what is waiting for me!

See here for information about each lecture, the respondents, and the accompanying handouts. https://www.wheaton.edu/academics/academic-centers/wadecenter/events/ken-and-jean-hansen-lectureship/noll-2022/