It was good fun last week to share my experience of unpacking my new book, The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis. The front-porch video got a few thousand spins on social media and hundreds of comments from friends. It was a nice moment to share with my family on the eve of Launch Day (Tuesday, Aug 11th).

Launch Day arrive in the United States of America without a hitch, I believe. Folks have been able to order The Spiritual Imagination wherever shiny books are sold, and I was able to purchase and post a pair of paper copies for the Marion E. Wade Centre, where so much of my earliest research took place. The Kindle is still 40% off in the US ($13.19), and it is still a “Top New Release” for 20th-century Literary Criticism–a category just ahead of Yak Husbandry in popularity, but still kind of neat. It even has its first review:

Thanks to the clearly adept, intelligent, and book-chic “Sky-blue,” whoever you are–and kudos to your parents for giving you such a creative name.

All systems in the countdown to launch in Chicago, New York, Fargo, and Houston are “go and nominal.” We have takeoff and everything is well in the United States–a relatively rare news heading item these days.

But what about Vancouver, Montreal, Iqaluit, and Cavendish? How did Launch Day go in Canada?

Here, it seems, in brave Canada with its wind-swept buffalo, last-hope sports teams, and secretive ketchup chips–well, here, we have had a failure to launch. We haven’t even walked out to the launchpad in slow motion yet.

It’s a problem I noted a few weeks ago, but one that hasn’t been fixed yet. Even today, nearly a week after it was launched, Amazon is out of stock of my book and still doesn’t have a listing priced. It’s selling well above list price ($38.50 in Canada) because it’s shipping from the US. And although the Kindle/Kobo lanuch went well, my book on Indigo.ca is authorless; on Amazon.ca, I’m listed as “University 1000 Coordinator and Bis Coordinator Assistant Professor Brenton D G Dickieson.” Clearly, my parents were not as clever in naming children as the primogenitors of our friend, the supremely skillful savant, Sky-blue.

It’s a metadata processing error, I am told. Usually, this isn’t a problem for me. I even got a compliment from an indie music producer about how good I am at metadata management. I think my parents were even considering “Metadata” as my middle name, but they went with “Bis Coordinator” instead.

This issue, however, is beyond me. I’ve talked to OUP (they are working on it), and tried to get my account approved by Amazon (still no word there). An author/publisher friend told me that my problem is I’m talking to a well-paid professional in charge of things when I should be talking to someone who has “Metadata” as a middle name and makes a dollar above minimum wage. Perhaps she is right.

So … what next?

I’m trying to look on the positive side of things. When I find out that my Lewis book is out here in the land of mighty beavers, hand-made toques, and 80% of our population amassed along the US border, I will get to have a second launch! In fact, there’s more to come. On the same hour last Thursday, I booked an on-campus launch with my local bookstore and a library event. I’ll share about that a bit later.

But we need the book on shelves. How can we have a book launch party without any books? It’s pretty essential.

Meanwhile, dear Canadians, the Kindle is on sale at Amazon for $21.99 CDN, and Indigo has the Kobo priced ato $17.39 CDN. Ensure your library has a copy (more on that here).

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.