Dear friends, I am happy to announce the launch dates for my new book! The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis (OUP, 2026) is now available in eBook format, and it is on its way to bookshelves near you.

What holds C.S. Lewis’s whole bookshelf together—Narnia, Mere Christianity, the letters, even the poetry most people forget? In The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Brenton Dickieson traces a secret thread: a cross-shaped, or cruciform, pattern of dying and rising that runs through everything Lewis wrote. For more than ten years, Dr. Dickieson has researched the “Shape” of C.S. Lewis’s vision of spiritual life. Now he has written a book that reads like a long conversation with a fellow pilgrim who has spent a life inside Lewis’s library.

It is difficult for me to describe the long and meaningful tangle of pathways that lead to this moment. I’ve been playing with language and story ideas so long that I’ve put off sharing the good news. But it is time to invite you all to read this book we’ve made (and I’ll talk more about the “we” another time). So in this note, I’ll talk about how to get the book (on sale), how to help share the book, and what it’s all about.

How You Can Get the Book

Available Now in eBook by the chapter or as a whole: DOI: https://academic.oup.com/book/62998

Available July 28, 2026 on Kindle and Kobo

Available August 11, 2026 in Hardcover at your local Bookstore (here’s the Bookmark’s link: https://bookmarkreads.ca/item/FHRU2k7yiQs3EkMBB6kIJQ)

OUP Direct Ordering: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-spiritual-imagination-of-cs-lewis-9780197663080?cc=ca&lang=en&

How You Can Get the Book on Sale

I am always talking about connecting with your local, indie bookstores, who in turn support our artists and writers. The Bookmark in Charlottetown will be helping me with a launch this fall!

Knowing how much UPress books cost, I wanted to do something different with this project. When I negotiated my contract with OUP, we worked together to make it as accessible as possible (though I don’t know when the audiobook will be released). We have offered this book at the lowest possible price. There are some ways to pre-order The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis on sale, right now!

• $17.13 CDN on Kindle at Amazon Canada (45% off, reg. $31.15), $17.13 CDN on Kindle at Amazon Canada (45% off, reg. $31.15), https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0H8PL5ZR8?r (the Canadian Hardcover price isn’t listed yet)
• $24.54 USD in Hardcover at Amazon US (30% off, reg. $35.00), https://a.co/d/0fx0kym9
• $21.99 USD on Kindle at Amazon US (37% off, reg. $35.00), https://a.co/d/0dH8BF4T (note, I think the Kindle will be priced lower than $35)
• £15.33 on Kindle at Amazon UK, https://a.co/d/0jhK526Z
• £22.99 in Hardcover at Amazon UK, https://a.co/d/0i9vUDT1
• $23.99 CDN on Kobo at Indigo.ca (20% off, reg. $29.85), https://www.indigo.ca/products/the-spiritual-imagination-of-c-s-lewis?variant=47186121294034

The Canadian Kindle price is so freakishly low that it might be an error, so Canadians should order now before it goes away!

The prices might change without warning. However, pre-ordering a book is an extremely effective way to help authors share their scholarship and artistry. It’s not about money–my contract has the lowest possible royalties. Rather, I would love to see the book go to second printing in paperback, which lowers the price even more!

How You Can Share the Book with Others

I always appreciate it when you folks share my work on Social Media and in your own writing. Please continue to do so!

Here’s my linktree with all of my accounts: https://linktr.ee/brentondickieson.

And… here are some ways you can support my work and maybe get a copy without paying.

Libraries

We walk down to our local library frequently, and I’m always bugging them at the Robertson Library on the UPEI campus. Here’s the secret: libraries order books. There are so many nonfiction books that librarians rely on feedback from their patrons to determine what the community needs. Request The Spiritual Imagination. You can get a copy to enjoy at no cost and then share it with everyone!

Talk to your local librarian and see if your library can get The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis on the shelves.

If you have access to a university library, ensure that the resource librarian for English, Literature, Spirituality Studies, and Religious Studies knows about this resource. Many libraries will get access through Oxford University Press online, but this is an inexpensive academic book that will be of endless help to scholars and students. Get them to order a copy for the shelves. And don’t forget your local Bible College, Seminary, and Liberal Arts College.

Reviews

Scholars and grad students know that they can get a comp copy of the upcoming text they are interested in by volunteering to be a reviewer for an Academic Journal. Reach out to your editor. If you are an editor, you can fill out this form or request a review copy by contacting reviews.global@oup.com directly.

Writers, bloggers, magazine reviewers, literary critics, and journalists can also request a review copy. Fill out this form or request a review copy by contacting reviews.global@oup.com directly.

Teachers and professors can request a review copy or exam copy for use in upcoming classes. Follow this link for more info.

I also hope to have 30% off discount codes for scholars, media, and writers, so reach out if you don’t have an editorial contact. Reach out to me if this is you: bdickieson@upei.ca.

What’s It All About?

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 twentieth-century English-speaking Christian public intellectual. Given the sheer diversity of Lewis’s writing, what holds all this together? What is the beating heart of Lewis’ work?

Among C.S. Lewis scholars, there is near-unanimous agreement with British philosopher Owen Barfield’s claim that, “what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.” In The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Brenton D. G. Dickieson argues that what Lewis reveals throughout his writings is a cross-shaped, or cruciform, spirituality. As an instinctive and integrative writer of spiritual theology, Lewis believed that “death is at the root of the whole matter”—that God’s self-surrender in Christ through death on a cross and subsequent resurrection is the normative pattern for a healthy spiritual life. This death-and-resurrection pattern unites Lewis’s Christian thought and produces a hopeful and evocative spirituality that is embedded in his poetry and prose.

By reconsidering him as a spiritual theologian, Dickieson uncovers a six-point “Logic of Cruciformity” in Lewis’s apologetics that is embedded in narrative form throughout his other works. The shape of the cross is the shape of Lewis’s spiritual theology. With the “upsidedownedness” of childlike wonder, Lewis reveals what Dickieson calls a “Theology of the Small,” filled with “sacred paradoxes” and offering a hopeful, transformative invitation to spiritual life.