Why Palin Is Smart to Read CS Lewis

Essay: 'Narnia' author wrote his fairy tales for all ages to 'convey truth'
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 21, 2010 11:57 AM CST
Why Palin Is Smart to Read CS Lewis
Sarah Palin greets fans as she signs her book "America by Heart" in Phoenix last month.   (AP Photo/Ralph Freso)

Sarah Palin took some ribbing from View host Joy Behar for saying (more than once) that CS Lewis is among her favorite authors. "Aren't they children's books?" Behar asked in derision. And with that question, Behar becomes like a character in one of Lewis' books—"the type of bully who mocks readers of fairy tales as simpletons," writes Micheal Flaherty in the Wall Street Journal. They are anything but.

Lewis "realized that books did more than prepare people for interesting conversations with journalists—they prepare us to respond to the crises we encounter in our own lives," writes Flaherty. Lewis—who, incidentally, "was a medieval and renaissance scholar at Oxford and the author of several brilliant Christian apologetics"—also believed that modern fairy tales were the best way to "convey truth," and he wrote his not just for kids but adults.
(More CS Lewis stories.)

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