C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British author, literary scholar, Christian apologist and Anglican lay theologian. He wrote both fiction, non-fiction, apologetical and non-apologetical works. He held academic positions at Magdalen College, Oxford (1925-1954) and eventually Magdelene College, Cambridge (1954-1963) teaching English literature. He is best known for his children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia and for his collection of non-fiction apologetics speeches called Mere Christianity.
He was a close friend of the Roman Catholic academic and author J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote the Lord of the Rings.
Life
He was born in Belfast, Ireland and was baptized in the Church of Ireland. Although he had a number of Anglican clergy in his family tree (particularly on his mother's side from whom he was descended from Hugh Hamilton who was variously Bishop of Clonfert and Kilmacdaugh and Bishop of Ossory) Lewis drifted from the faith during his adolescence.
He went on to attend Oxford University in 1916, on an academic scholarship at University College.
However his time at school was interrupted by the First World War. He joined the Officers' Training Corp at his university and was eventually commissioned as an officer in the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. During his time in the war he saw some of the most brutal sections of trench warfare along the Somme, in which he was eventually injured.
He was demobilized in December 1918, whereafter he returned to his schooling.
After he graduated he became a philosophy tutor at University College and, in 1925, was elected a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College.
It was in conversation with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien that he began to consider Christianity again for the first time.
In 1929, he became a generic theist, and it wasn't until a long late-night walk along Addison's Walk in 1931 with his friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that he was finally convinced of Christianity. Despite the hope of his friend Tolkien that he would become a Roman Catholic, Lewis returned to the faith of his family and became a member of the Church of England. Thereafter, he became an orthodox Anglican in theology and practice and would go on to defend the Prayer Book tradition and the theological boundaries of Anglicanism.