Main Idea
Surprised by Joy
Among all the influential Christian thinkers throughout history, C.S. Lewis is among a select few who were, at some point in their lives, strongly atheist. Looking at Lewis’ literary output and his profound influence on popular and academic Christianity in the 20th century, one might be hard-pressed to believe that, as a young man, Lewis was an avowed unbeliever.
Surprised by Joy details that long, varied journey from faith to atheism and back again. Lewis carries us through his early childhood, a hapless, happy existence, into his rowdy adolescence, his priggish high-school years, and his early adulthood’s burgeoning rationalism. Throughout, Lewis encounters horrid and brutal schoolmasters, the death of his mother, suffocating intra-scholastic social hierarchies, strains and bonds with his brother and father, friendships, losses, and a myriad of other formative events.
Defining that journey, always lingering at the fringes of Lewis’ life, was a certain inexplicable feeling — one that would be the first key to his religious awakening: Joy. This is not joy in the standard, connotative sense, but something much deeper — as Lewis puts it, Joy with a capital J.
