In this highly personal, thoughtful, intelligent memoir, Lewis guides us toward joy and toward the surprise that awaits anyone who seeks a life beyond the expected.'e Lewis tempered his logic with a love for beauty, wonder, and magic. It is perhaps this aspect of Surprised by Joy that webelievers and nonbelieversfind most compelling and meaningful Lewis was searching for joy, for an elusive and momentary sensation of glorious yearning, but he found it, and spiritual life, through the use of reason. Lewistakes us fromhis childhood in Belfast through the loss of his mother, to boarding school and a youthful atheism in England, to the trenches of World War I, and then toOxford, where he studied, read, and, ultimately, reasoned his way back to God. It is, however, certainly one of the most beautiful and insightful accounts of a person coming to faith.

God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.'e This book is not an autobiography. Written for the screen and directed by two-time Emmy and BAFTA winner Norman Stone (BBC’s Shadowlands), The Most Reluctant Convert brings to life the spiritual evolution of one the 20th century’s sharpest minds and keenest wits.'e A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. Beautifully filmed in and around Oxford this engaging biopic follows the creator of The Chronicles of Narnia from the tragic death of his mother when he was just nine years old, through his strained relationship with his father, to the nightmare of the trenches of World War I to Oxford University, where friends like J.R.R. The Most Reluctant Convert features award-winning actor Max McLean as the older Lewis and Nicholas Ralph – breakout star of PBS Masterpiece’s All Creatures Great and Small – as young Lewis. Lewis looks back on his remarkable journey from hard-boiled atheist to the most renowned Christian writer of the past century. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Guest: David Bates from Pints with Jack: The C.S. Lewis’s journey from atheism to Christianity. In this episode of Talking Beasts: The Narnia Podcast, the podcasters review The Most Reluctant Convert, an adaptation of the stage play starring Max McLean.

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