“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”

@PerthshireMags on X

As I write, wildfires burn in the hills of Llanwonno, above Pontypridd where I live in south Wales. The forest that I go walking in with the local Forest Church group is literally on fire right now.

Earlier this summer, my children’s school had to close because they couldn’t keep it cool enough to be safe in the extreme heat. When schools close and the smoke is hanging in the air outside my own windows, it brings the reality starkly home: we’re facing a climate emergency of our own making and we’re ill-equipped to deal with the consequences.

Heatwaves and wildfires aren’t new, of course. We’ve long had to deal with them from time to time. But their increasing frequency and intensity are signs in line with the broader trend. As record-breaking heatwaves are followed by record-breaking wildfires, with a record-breaking El Niño still expected to come, it seems plain to me that the climate crisis isn’t something to be imagined: it’s already here.

(Just to note, I think there’s room for debate on how we respond to this socially, economically and politically, and whether we could have reaped the benefits of industrialisation without creating these problems. But I don’t see there as being much room for serious disagreement that humans are driving climate change and that this faces us with increasing challenges in the coming years. But feel free to have at it in the comments!)

Can imagination help save the day?

As someone obsessed with story, I like to think of imagination as a positive force. Our climate challenges are the result of a series of profound failures of imagination, including:

• Failure to imagine the consequences of our lifestyles, or to empathise with the impact on the people and countries who are most vulnerable to climate change

• Failure to imagine change, and better ways of living more responsibly and sustainably

• Failure to imagine political solutions that can mobilise broad coalitions

But I have to admit that imagination can be a double-edged sword. We can imagine and anticipate threats to avert them – or we can retreat into escapist fantasy to deny them.

We can imagine solutions and set about the hard work of building them – or we can comfort ourselves with imagined easy answers that will never fly in reality.

Do our imaginings of the future help or hinder us? Do post-apocalyptic fictions help prepare us to face the future, or numb us to it?

Facing the dystopian future

Science fiction and fantasy can provide us with images and language to speak of the challenges we face. As France recently suffered its first pyrocumulonimbus “fire storms”, which rain down wind and ash and lightning and sparks, often with rainfall evaporating before it hits the floor, it couldn’t help but occur to me that these are storms that fall like dragons, like the desolation of Smaug on Dale and the lonely mountain with conflagration and misery.

Like many, I recently watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which impressed me as a thoughtful interpretation and engagement with Homer’s classic that connects it to present concerns. By looking to a fantastic version of the past, he speaks to our apocalyptic present: we have broken the bonds that held our civilisation together, a world is ending – and yet the film offers a hope of renewal.

The word “apocalyptic” gets thrown about loosely, as we reach for language sufficient for the scale of the challenges we face. “Apocalypse” means revelation, and what is being revealed to us is the consequences of our actions, our collective failure to stop the fire, by decades of inaction and squabbling and prevaricating.

Apocalypticism can often lend a religious fervour to climate anxiety – the sense that we are being punished for our environmental transgressions. That doesn’t necessarily work in favour of the climate cause: people are wary of fanaticism and to having sacrifices demanded of them, as we see in climate scepticism and the backlash to “net zero” policies. But there is a form of apocalyptic storytelling that doesn’t just reveal our failings, but points beyond them to solutions.

Imagination as threat-anticipation

Imagination is important for anticipating and escaping disaster. Part of its survival value is that imagination allows us to picture possible threats and devise plans and strategies to escape it.

When the COVID pandemic hit and lockdown was imposed in 2020, some people I spoke to said things like “I can’t believe this is actually happening!” I found this surprising: I’d read enough both science fiction and popular science to know it was only a matter of time before we faced some kind of pandemic. I’d absorbed plenty of post-apocalyptic stories, such as Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel and the Rise/Dawn/War of the Planet of the Apes movie trilogy.

So on some level I was imaginatively prepared and perhaps had a more realistic assessment of how long it would take to get through the pandemic – especially in the face of misleading suggestions from politicians that it would only take a few weeks to bring it under control. On the other hand, I couldn’t fully imagine quite how difficult that time would be: I got Covid early on, and ended up with Long Covid, burnout and a whole cascade of long-term impacts on me and my family. Millions lost loved ones.

But compared to the post-apocalyptic scenarios I’d absorbed imaginatively, at least Covid didn’t turn out to be civilisation-ending, or result in widespread social collapse (as much as it did fray social cohesion and trust). The pandemic didn’t turn out to be Stephen King’s The Stand, where a lab leak wipes out 99.4% of the population, leaving the survivors to battle between good and evil in the ruins of society.

So without minimising the pandemic’s impact, I’m grateful it wasn’t worse, because I can easily imagine it being otherwise.

Imagination as solution-finding

From Deep Impact and saving the world from an asteroid, to Project Hail Mary and rescuing Earth from a sun dimmed by alien astrophage, science fiction frequently offers us apocalyptic visions along with salvation from disaster.

Nolan tells us such a tale in Interstellar. In it, a blight on Earth’s crops has pushed humanity to the edge of extinction, and despair about the future. While not explicitly linked to climate change, the resonance with our climate anxieties is obvious. But the film shows us a humanity that has given up on looking upwards, on reaching for the stars. Interstellar warns us of the danger of ceasing to imagine a better future.

Imagination enables us to picture ways in which the world might be made better, in which our problems might be solved. Imagination is part of the process of understanding something, of putting together clues, following a hunch until you reach that Eureka! moment of insight and invention.

This can often be an uncomfortable and subversive process, and one that existing powers and authorities can view very dimly. Ursula K Le Guin wrote an essay It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is about the power of imagination to see how the world could be different:

“Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?” To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.

Imagination has the power to question reality as it is presented to us, and imagine alternatives.

Imagination and wishful thinking

There is also a dangerous flip-side to imagination, which is wishful thinking.

We imagine that something will turn up. We imagine some technological breakthrough will be made that will take all our problems away, without doing the hard work of testing and building it.

We imagine the pain of the climate crisis will be felt by those people over there in some distant part of the world, rather by us in comfortable developed Western countries.

Interstellar offers hope in the stars: the dream that humans will spread out into the cosmos. Matthew McConaughey says “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”

Now I love the idea of humans boldly going where no one has gone before. I thrill to science fiction that tells stories of exploration and expansion. But scientifically speaking, I am unpersuaded that interstellar space travel is anything but delightful fantasy. The hard physical constraints on human life mean our destiny is bound up with our home planet.

As I wrote in an article on Interstellar back when it was released:

Interstellar travel is the rapture for materialists. As George Monbiot astutely observed in the Guardian, it’s the hope that rather than dealing with the problems we face here on earth, we can escape to a new world. But even if that were possible, it doesn’t deal with human nature, and so we would just take all our problems with us.

We need imagination coupled with empiricism; ingenuity that is connected to fact and to practical reality.

When hope turns dangerous

Hope can be a trap, if it is just wishful thinking that a solution will present itself. Hope doesn’t help unless there is something real to base our hope on.

Politics is often plagued by Cakeism (we can have our cake and eat it, avoiding hard trade offs – like politicians abandoning Net Zero commitments while assuring us the climate will all somehow work out fine) and Boosterism (we just need to Believe in Ourselves and we will overcome all difficulties – see Brad Bird’s sci-fi paean to techno-optimism Tomorrowland for a pop culture example, or former British PM Boris Johnson’s speeches about British ingenuity for the political equivalent).

The confidence to attempt to find solutions is necessary but it is far from sufficient.

A hopeful disposition is helpful if it motivates us to action, but false hope risks sending us up blind alleys or lulling us into complacency. We won’t solve our problems if we despair, but we need to face the problems before us with clear-eyed realism if we are to have any chance of finding solutions that actually work.

Now I don’t want to foreclose imagination or scientific investigation. If the warp drive or equivalent is possible, I’d be delighted. But we mustn’t allow the hope of some paradigm-busting breakthrough to stop us from taking more immediate action to address our problems in the here and now.

In Interstellar, Michael Caine’s character Dr Brand, claims: “We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.”

That’s exactly the kind of world-denying escapism we need to avoid. Astronaut Cooper similarly bristles at the idea of humans becoming caretakers rather than explorers – but if we are to be explorers, we need to first take care of our beautiful, unique home of planet Earth.

In Interstellar, there is a higher power manipulating events to save the world – but it isn’t God, but future humanity, bootstrapping its survival in a temporal paradox. Cooper plays his part in closing the self-causing temporal loop that will take humanity forward into the stars. Nolan’s narrative seeks to stir up our imaginations to discovery and exploration again, rather than despair. That’s a message worth heeding, even as I would caution that we should focus our imaginative energies on a better future here on this world first, rather than out there in the stars. I also believe it underestimates the depth of our problem and need for change.

Imagination and transformation

Living sustainably on our planet is a deeper issue than merely technical problem-solving. There are deep moral and spiritual dimensions to it.

One dimension is the need to accept limits. This goes back to the Cakeism problem: we refuse to accept that there are limits and trade-offs. Now some of these can be mitigated by technology and innovation given time. But unless we are ready to ask “what is enough?”, to embrace contentment, we’ll keep running up hard against reality by living beyond our means ecologically.

Again, the tension is that we often don’t know in advance which limits are genuinely fixed, and which can be overcome through new knowledge and technology. The famous Serenity Prayer asks for:

the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

That’s become familiar to the point of cliché but speaks to a genuine tension that we all face.

Another dimension is the need for grace. One of the paralysing psychological dynamics of the climate crisis can be the sense of guilt and shame that comes with recognising our culpability for messing up the planet. It can make facing the problem too much to bear, because it means facing our own failings as a species square in the eye.

In the Christian understanding, grace is the scandalous, unmerited forgiveness that God offers to all who truly repent and believe. The scandal comes with the possibility that people might abuse it, and use it as license to continue their behaviour – “cheap grace”, as German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it. But the Christian understanding is that grace, when truly understood, is liberating and transformative. Grace enables us to move past our sin and to begin the process of change.

A third dimension is our relationship to nature. Unless we can transform our vision of the world from a bare thing to be used and dominated, to an inherently meaningful and valuable order that we are part of, and bear responsibility for and to, the cycles of our broken relationship will just repeat.

This is one of the reasons the re-enchantment (or de-disenchantment!) project of writers like Malcolm Guite in his Merlin’s Isle series (watch my interview with him here) and Martin Shaw in Liturgies of the Wild (read my review here) is so important: we need to recover a view of creation as a gift, spiritually alive, which we are not separate from but participate in.

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine is also helpful in stirring our imagination to consider the alternatives to what Kingsnorth dubs “the Machine” of technocratic modernity. I would see more of a positive role for technology and civilisation than Kingsnorth, but his jeremiad is a powerful counterblast to the prevailing ideology of progress that pervades our age.

The climate crisis and the Creator

Underlying that sense of creation as gift is a gratitude towards the Creator as giver. Of course, you don’t need to believe in God in order to pursue a transformation of our relationship with our planet – many people are pursuing that from all sorts of worldviews and perspectives.

But as a Christian myself, I believe it helps to recognise not only a responsibility to the natural world, to our neighbours and to future generations, but also to the Creator who made it all good. If you want to save the planet, start by attending to your soul. Contentment comes from finding alignment with the divine, with the transcendent – and so does motivation to change, to what in Biblical terms might be termed “repentance”.

Modern people often baulk at the language of “sin”, but I think many of us recognise in our treatment of the planet that we have fallen short, we have transgressed boundaries we should have respected, we have left undone things that we should have done to address the problem. It’s perhaps here that the secular imagination comes closest to really feeling the weight of what past generations called sin.

But what a secular framework struggles to provide is an equivalent expression of the idea of grace, of forgiveness. Christians believe that forgiveness is a gift of God, who gives us every chance to make amends and turn back to him. Far from encouraging indifference or self-indulgence, Christians see grace as doing something guilt simply can’t: it moves us to lasting change, born of gratitude and generosity.

Again, there is much that needs to be done practically to address our problems on top of this, but I believe this spiritual dimension is the foundation of true change of human nature away from self-absorbed short-sightedness, to loving sacrifice for the sake of our neighbours, natural world and our future.

Within the Christian tradition, the tension of the “now and not yet” of the kingdom of heaven helps guard a hopeful realism. The doctrine of sin guards against a naive utopianism, of thinking we can build heaven on earth merely by technical prowess – an attempt which can easily turn dystopian. But because Christians have the hope that Jesus is coming back – not, as is commonly misunderstood, to whisk us away to heaven elsewhere, but instead to renew the world (read more on Heaven vs Resurrection) – we can participate in the project of the kingdom of heaven, and work towards its imperfect, partial realisation in the present. Imagining the kingdom coming allows us to renew the world through building the kingdom now.

And with recognising the “now and not yet” comes hope: A hope of redemption that isn’t complacency, but the recognition that help is on offer to humanity, in all our weakness, cruelty and short-sightedness, if only we have the humility to accept it.

Can imagination help save the day?

Can this help on the slopes of Llanwonno, as firefighters try to stop the flames reaching the nearby villages and towns of the Valleys?

Probably not right now, in the heat of the moment. But stories can prepare us to come together in solidarity to deal with crises that face us, and imagine better worlds, even as those disasters on social media get closer and closer.

The best science fiction stories do something similar to the Christian story, mapping the tensions between the imaginable and the possible, the utopian and the achievable, the now and not yet.

Imagination is a necessary ingredient in finding better futures and in finding empathy to care for one another in the face of increasing climate challenges.

But imagination alone isn’t enough.

Imagination can put us on the path to truth and to solutions, if we test what we grasp imaginatively rationally and empirically.

Imagination and reason need to work together – they make us aware both of possibilities and our limits.

And our limits point us to our need for help: help from one another in communities of care and resilience, and, I would submit, help from our Creator.

Let our imaginations burn brighter than the fires we have unleashed – not with fire of apocalyptic destruction, but of revelation and renewal.

Listen to my poem Planet Planet Burning Bright

Tonight at 8pm: Of Man’s First Disobedience L’Abri Lecture on Zoom

Is wisdom ever innocent, and innocence ever wise? Is rebellion a necessary part of growing up? How have some of our culture’s best children’s fiction engaged with these themes, in the long shadow of Milton and Genesis?

Tonight at 8pm UK time I’ll be giving the Friday night lecture at English L’Abri Fellowship, on childhood, maturity and the Fall in C S Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials”. The password is “Lecture”.

Join on Zoom

Science Fiction and Myth

How does science fiction, from popular franchises like Star Wars and Doctor Who, to critical hits like Dune and Everything Everywhere All At Once, reveal our culture's longings for spiritual significance? What are the similarities between faith and fandom? How might these stories be bridges for opening up conversation around life's big questions?

This talk was recorded 9th May 2026 at Hutchmoot UK, a festival of arts, creativity and faith.

Watch on YouTube:

Links:

• Hutchmoot UK : https://hutchmootuk.com

• To subscribe to my Bigger on the Inside Substack visit: https://biggerinside.co.uk

• Check out ’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DamienWalter

What are you a fan of? Do you see a connection between the stories that you love, and your overall worldview, faith or outlook on life? Have you found stories a good starting point for philosophical and spiritual discussions? Let me know your thoughts!

Leave a comment

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Hello readers, and welcome new subscribers! Now there is probably nothing less interesting to you than the cat-ate-my-homework reasons for why I haven’t written much in the way of essays on my Substack lately. But I’ve been wrestling with tensions and trying to capture something more personal and private than I typically write. And that’s taken some time for me to process.

I want to be honest: I’ve been tired. Tired of the circus of subscriber-chasing, notesmaxxing, algorithm-second-guessing, wannabe-influencing, content creating.

Not that I’m very good at all that, but it’s the kind of insidious beat that gets inside your head and you find yourself tapping along to its rhythm, all without meaning to.

So I keep needing to be reminded of what my vocation as a thinker and writer is really all about.

Let’s rewind to the beginning of May, when I made my now-annual pilgrimage to Hutchmoot UK, a Christian conference focused around art, creativity and community. It’s a wonderful gathering of creatives and I have many friends in that community.

But with my efforts to find a publisher for the book I’m writing, The Meaning Gap, rattling around in my head, I couldn’t help but arrive at Hutchmoot with a bit of anxiety, a worry that I should be making more content, networking more smartly, leveraging my connections to somehow make my platform that bit more attractive. And that was sucking something of the joy out of my Hutchmoot experience.

The big Friday evening event was the UK debut of the Every Moment Holy Live show, based around the Every Moment Holy books of liturgies – prayers for all occasions, from the joyful everyday to moments of deepest grief and loss.

While I deeply appreciated the books and the liturgies they contained, I’d been a little wary of the idea of Every Moment Holy Live as a show. I was concerned that something written as prayers could be distorted by the act of translation into a performance. But I had a lot of faith in the people involved in it. And that faith proved well-rewarded when I experienced it for myself.

It was a searingly honest and powerful account of grief, loss and hope, with writer Doug McKelvey and illustrator Ned Bustard sharing about the devastating illness and loss of Ned’s wife Leslie in the course of the writing and illustration of book II.

My last few years have felt like a slow collapse of many of my dreams, through long COVID, burnout, challenges in family life, struggles with work, long-held ambitions being ruled out.

I worked as Publishing Director at IVP Books from 2019 to 2023. It was a senior Christian publishing role and felt like a wonderful fit with my sense of calling to engage culturally and critically with culture for Christ, and to help others to do the same. So when I had to leave because of burnout, exhausted and battered, I was confused about what I was called to next.

I had a long-held dream of at some stage serving as a worker at L’Abri, a Christian intentional community, and as a couple, my wife Beverley and I had felt a pull towards it. After leaving IVP, I had started to consider that more seriously.

But while we were staying at the English L’Abri in Hampshire, I’d had to face up to the reality that the demands of it would just be too much for the stage we were at as a family. Heartbroken after an honest but painful conversation with Beverley recognising that, I went out into the night and prayed ‘A Liturgy for the Death of a Dream’ from Every Moment Holy, laying my grief before God with tears.

So when that liturgy was read at Hutchmoot, all my suppressed grief came rushing in on me.

I was undone. I couldn’t keep the tears back.

A friend saw I was upset and stepped outside with me, talking and comforting as I shared something more of my story than I’d disclosed before, telling the tale behind the raw nerves the evening had touched. I saw now I still needed to mourn the griefs of the past few years, the many trials that I and my family have been through. He sat and listened and prayed with me, and I’m deeply grateful.

I’ve always recognised in theory the need to make room for lament. But now I was learning it in practice, helped by Doug and Ned’s vulnerability, the beauty of the words and images they created, and the performances of the musicians that evening capturing emotion in sound.

And as I composed myself that evening, I appreciated the easy friendliness of Hutchmoot UK, being able to go up to a table, join a game and a conversation without friction or embarrassment.

But Every Moment Holy Live also put my worries about platform, publication and vocation into a wider perspective. Earlier this year, we’d reconsidered L’Abri in the light of changing family circumstances, but reached the same conclusion. With the dream of being a L’Abri worker out the picture, my dream of being a writer took centre-stage as the locus of my vocation. And along the way, my desire to be published had perhaps become load-bearing beyond what is healthy.

So the other thing that touched me deeply was Doug McKelvey’s account of worrying for a long time that he hadn’t had the impact in life he wanted, that his dreams had been frustrated. It was out of writing liturgies just for those in his life that Every Moment Holy developed – and then that ended up having a life and impact beyond what he could have imagined.

And that’s what really stuck with me from Hutchmoot this year:

Focus on faithfulness.

Focus on craft.

Focus on patience.

Focus on doing my work well and doing good to others through it. And let success come according to God’s standard and in God’s time.

Remembering these let me relax and enjoy Hutchmoot for what it was as community and fellowship, not as a venue for platform-building or occasion for coveting the success of others.

But I was still waiting for news on my book… was this renewed sense of focus the readying I needed before getting a book deal? Or was it preparation for weathering the disappointment of rejection?

Hutchmoot was a milestone, but God still had more to teach me. But that’s another story and this part of it has taken long enough.

For now, let me leave you with Jon Lowry’s version of ‘A Liturgy for the Death of a Dream’ from Every Moment Holy Prayer Songs, the performance of which so affected me that night at Hutchmoot:

Coming soon: Science fiction as Modern Myth

While at Hutchmoot, I did a talk on Science Fiction as Myth, which I’ll be releasing a special bonus episode of the Imaginative Discipleship podcast. Make sure you’re subscribed to be told when it’s out!

Hello and a particular welcome to recent subscribers! I’m so glad to have people joining me on my journey into story, myth and meaning-making. And I’m excited to share with you a couple of exciting podcast appearances that I recorded a while back but have just been published – keep reading for those.

I also have lots of thoughts and articles in progress – time has been flying. I’ve got a review publishing soon of Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild and I’m working on a couple of articles on science fiction and sci-fi fandom. Also, I haven’t yet had chance to write up my full thoughts on Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, this year’s Hutchmoot UK conference, the cancellation of the Doctor Who Christmas special or my trip to the Cambridge Apologetics Conference!

I’ve also been reflecting on “writing at the speed of life”, on my struggles to juggle my writing and creativity alongside work and family life. It’s not easy but I keep at it!

Narnia, Pullman and the need for myth with Damien Walter

First up, is a new Premier Unbelievable debate with Damien Walter discussing C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, myth and meaning-making. Damien is a YouTube science fiction critic and very attuned to the mythic dimensions of sci-fi, and I really appreciate his analysis and the online community he has built.

We took the recent discussion between Philip Pullman and Alex O’Connor of the Narnia books as a launchpad, discussing whether the Fall should be celebrated or lamented – you can also read my thoughts on that here:

So it was great to get chance to talk through some of the big questions about the human need for myth, and whether that points to something real and true. Do check out the debate and Damien’s YouTube channel and Substack!

For me, the big question is whether myth is purely something we need to build because of the quirks of our evolutionary development – or is it actually a signpost to something real, to a “true myth” as Tolkien and Lewis believed Christianity to be. I consider the historical case for Jesus’ life, death and resurrection to be surprisingly plausible and persuasive. I know many find that hard to swallow, but I’d encourage anyone to look into the history.

Science Fiction

Email updates from the Science Fiction podcast and community.

By Damien Walter

Community, conversation and creativity

The second podcast appearance is on Nara Fellowship, with . Valerie and I share an overlap of online communities – we are both part of “The Little Corner” of the Internet linked to the meaning crisis conversation, Estuary Protocol and all that jazz, on the one hand, and on the other hand to the Rabbit Room online creative community. Valerie edited the Writers of Meaning anthology, which is well worth checking out!

Our conversation covers community, intellectual hospitality, and juggling creativity with other obligations in our lives.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of “cosy storytelling” and what are necessary ingredients for a good story – stories require tension, but how might the tension of difficulty rather than good vs evil drive some kinds of storytelling? What light might this cast on the Christian idea of Heaven and new creation, and not getting bored if we live forever in a perfect world?

Valerie Flynn

Valerie Flynn is an author and podcaster. As a lifelong learner she enjoys following rabbit trails wherever her curiosity leads her.

Going deeper into the wardrobe (or TARDIS)

These kinds of friendly, respectful conversations encapsulate much of what I’m trying to do here at Bigger on the Inside.

In my writing and conversations, I look to story as a way of finding connection and common ground for talking about meaning, myth and our ultimate commitments – whether that takes the form of philosophy, fandom or traditional forms of religion. I’m drawn to the mythic, and its modern forms in science fiction and fantasy particularly, but every story is a way of making sense of the world on some level.

Over the years, I’ve keenly felt the pressures of our age of ‘meaning crisis’, of suspicion of narratives as well as an overwhelming competition of narratives. But I think stories offer us a good way of sharing different ways of looking at the world, and talking about stories allows us to uncover the hidden depths of what we believe and the stories we try to live by.

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As well as a lover of story and mythology, I’m a Christian and believe that the Gospel story is true and uniquely fitted to our needs as human beings. But I want to listen well, learn from others and engage in genuine conversation. So I hope I am creating a place of genuine exchange and of intellectual honesty, rather than “preaching” in the negative sense (though I hope that from time to time my writing can preach in the best sense of telling stories with truth and power).

If you are on a quest for meaning, on a quest for truth, then I hope you will find my Substack a place worth hanging out – do join the conversation and share your responses to my conversations and to my wider project by leaving a comment below, or dropping me an email on caleb@biggerinside.co.uk.

I’d love to hear from you: what are the stories that shaped you? Do you feel the need for a myth to live by?

Britain is sweltering under an early summer heatwave, breaking records for May temperatures today. It’s the kind of weather where you expect Hobbits to appear seeking to destroy a Ring in the heat. A picnic under the shade of trees in Bute Park in Cardiff today was the occasion of the photo above, with fierce sun through the leaves.

Yesterday I got sunburned from standing outside in the sun in Hay-on-Wye, so my arms are sore and red. Sunday was also Pentecost, when Christians remember the sending of the Holy Spirit to Jesus’ disciples after he ascended into Heaven. So all that went into the mix of inspiring the words below.

Also just to note, I hope to share soon the recording of my talk on Science Fiction as Modern Mythmaking from Hutchmoot, so keep an eye on your inbox for that!

Son Burn

Still it burns
My skin turned raw-red
From some ninety-three
Million miles
Our home star
Scorching hands and arms and legs
On some
Overeager summer May
Fierce Pentecost
Rightly named
Sun Day

Yet fiercer still
Is the Son’s light
Nearer, as suffusing
All things
And unscreened we would
be by glory
much more burned

Yet other hands and legs and arms
were pierced not by rays
but nails

And now new flame
is sent to screen
and save
To lighten and with that
Glory blaze
So we with Son’s passion
Are burned
But not consumed.

In this long-lost episode originally recorded for season 1, Caleb Woodbridge talks with Nate Morgan Locke, self-described “Reformed Mythologist” and (now former) Creative Director at Speak Life, about how myth, story, and imagination can be “baptised” to see the world through the lens of Jesus as the true myth.

Hear Nate on Invisible Strings in Story at Hay-on-Wye, 24 May 2026

Nate will be speaking on Invisible String in the Stories We Love and Lives We Live in Hay-on-Wye on Sunday 24th May, 5.30pm at Bethesda Church Hay.

It’s during the Hay Festival though not affiliated in any way with that event, but part of an unofficial “Hay Faith Fringe”, if you like:

• Festival Tent, Saturday and Sunday 23-24 May, 9-4pm

• The Princess and the Goblin Film Night, Saturday 23 May, 6pm

• Talk by Nate Morgan Locke, Sunday 24 May, 5.30pm

I’ll also be around at Hay, including on the Invisible String festival tent on the roadside between the festival and the town, as well as attending some festival talks.

Watch out too for more details of the Invisible String book group, coming soon!

Links & Resources

• Nate Morgan Locke on YouTube: @ReformedMythologist

• Speak Life on YouTube @SpeakLifeMedia

• Nate’s new project, Hero's Creed — www.heroscreed.com

• Caleb’s article on Stealing Past Watchful Dragons by Reading the Bible Imaginatively

Follow Imaginative Discipleship

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imaginative.discipleship

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imaginative.discipleship

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@imaginative.discipleship

Timings

0:46 The lost episode!

2:22 Introducing Nate

2:41 What is a 'Reformed Mythologist'?

4:33 What is (was) Nate's work with Speak Life?

7:20 Analysing the lunchbox stories

8:46 All time favourite stories

10:48 Meatloaf and Charles Wesley

13:08 Recovering the glory of the ordinary

17:36 Portal fantasy and Doctor Who

20:22 Reception of C S Lewis outside Christian circles

27:19 Seeing pop culture in light of Christ

34:52 Baptism of the imagination

41:54 Reading the Bible and enjoying myth

44:53 Anansi and the genesis of story

50:35 Wrapping up

Pullman recently went on Alex O’Connor’s Within Reason podcast, reiterating his long-held, self-described hatred of Narnia – he thinks Lewis tells lies to children. But what do Lewis and Pullman have in common with their view of imagination? Can you have a Republic of Heaven instead of a Kingdom? Is Pullman "of Aslan's party without knowing it"?

I was delighted that the Critic online magazine chose to publish my response to why Philip Pullman, exploring how he is more like C. S. Lewis than he might think.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion it has created, with long threads debating it on Facebook groups about C. S. Lewis, mythology and science fiction.

Check it out and let me know what you think – and keep reading here for further reflections on this debate from my academic paper on the topic…

Read the article

A bonus for supporters

My article for the Critic is based on an academic paper I gave at the C. S. Lewis International Interdisciplinary Conference back in November. As a bonus for my supporters, I’m including my paper and a video of me delivering it below, covering the topic from some different angles (plus a bunch of footnotes!)

Almost all my output is available freely, but as a freelance writer and editor, I give a significant amount of time to writing and podcasting about imagination, meaning-making and faith here on Substack.

That comes with real costs: financial (software subscriptions and the like) as well as time and opportunity cost – it’s time I’m then not spending doing paid editorial work.

Of Man’s First Disobedience: innocence, wisdom and the Fall in The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials

Down through the years, poets, storytellers and theologians have interpreted and reinterpreted the origin myth of the Fall. C. S. Lewis and Phillip Pullman each reimagine the Fall as a way of engaging with questions of innocence and wisdom, and what it means to grow up as a human being.

Pullman’s trilogy is very consciously a response to the Narnia books, both deeply influenced by them and seeking to repudiate many of their messages. “I hate the Narnia books,” said Pullman, “and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away”.1

But is this an accurate appraisal of the Narnia books, and are the ideas of childhood and growing up in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy really so different? I believe that while there are deep theological differences, there are also some surprising affinities and continuities, as we’ll explore.

The differences in outlook are evident from their very beginnings. There is an intriguing parallel with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the opening chapter of Northern Lights: both share in the characters of Lucy and Lyra young female protagonists who each have a strong sense of curiosity, and crucially, both begin their adventures by hiding in a wardrobe.

But the differing circumstances in which they do so encapsulates the deep difference in outlooks between the two stories: Lyra is trespassing, a transgression of the rules, whereas Lucy’s exploration is innocent. What are the implications of this?

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Easter greetings to you all! As a reader and sometime scholar of Arthurian literature, I’m thrilled that Galahad and the Grail, book one of Merlin’s Isle, Malcolm Guite’s epic poetic retelling of the “matter of Britain”, is now published, available from Canterbury Press in the UK and Rabbit Room Press in the USA, wonderfully illustrated by Stephen Crotts.

I invite you to join me in an online book group to discuss it over 3 weeks, to come together and chat it through, whether you are new to the story of Arthur or deeply immersed in the tradition.

Sessions will take place Mondays 8pm BST / 4pm EDT / 3pm CDT / 1pm PDT:

• Week 1 — Monday 13th April: Prelude / Book One: The Coming of Galahad

• Week 2 — Monday 20th April: Book Two: Adventures of the Quest

• Week 3 — Monday 27th April: Book Three: The Achievement of the Grail / Epilogue

Note this is purely a fan/community book group, not associated with or endorsed by Hutchmoot, Rabbit Room, Canterbury Press or Malcolm Guite (though I hope they will be glad that this kind of community-led discussion is happening!)

Sign up here

Why join this group?

• Fun and informal fan discussion

• Dig deeper into the spiritual and philosophical themes of the poem

• Insights from me as your resident student of the Arthurian tradition – I studied it and wrote about it for my English Literature MA so I know my way around it (though not quite as intimately as Malcolm Guite!)

What will the format be?

The sessions will be 90 minutes long and will include:

• Reading selections from the book

• A short introduction from myself putting it in the context of the Arthurian tradition and introducing some themes and questions

• Open time for facilitated discussion

You will be welcome to join in and share your perspective. I’ll seek to gently shepherd the discussion to give everyone who wants to speak a fair chance to participate. If you just want to listen in without talking, that’s welcome too!

Who is the group for?

The book group is open to all — whether you are subscribed to my newsletter or not, whether you are in the UK or elsewhere, consider yourself creative or not, whether you have a faith perspective or different outlook — if you are interested in the book, you are very welcome!

Sign up here

What else I’ve been up to

I recently made another appearance on the Premier Unbelievable podcast to debate morality with an Objectivist (follower of Ayn Rand’s philosophy).

Now Objectivism is pretty philosophically unfashionable in many quarters and I think it’s got big issues – but any set of ideas that a significant number of people believe in is worth engaging, and the contrast between the Objectivist ethic of rational self-interest and Christian ethic of self-giving love makes for an illuminating foil.

I hope to share more thoughts and reflections on the debate in a subsequent post, and particularly how Ayn Rand’s novels offer an imaginative vision of her philosophy that is a key part of her continuing influence. But for now you can check out the debate here:

What’s coming up

I’ve had a busy time lately working on my book on imagination and meaning-making, as well as a few different illnesses hitting the family, so I had to have a bit of a pause on releasing new essays and on new episodes of Imaginative Discipleship.

But fear not, there’s plenty coming up, with episodes on reimagining being human, on storytelling and on “baptising the imagination” with myth.

I recently finished reading Liturgies of the Wild by Martin Shaw and have lots I want to say about rewilding our imaginations…

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Galahad and the Grail online book group

I’ve also been excited to get hold of my copy of Malcolm Guite’s new Arthurian epic poem, Galahad and the Grail.

I’ll be running an online book group to discuss it starting after Easter - if you would like to take part, whether new to the Arthur story, or immersed in the tales, please vote for the time slots that would suit you!

It’s open to all, whether paid or unpaid subscribers.

Register your interest

The Miracle at Mount Doom

On this day in Middle-earth, the Ring was destroyed. But this date, 25th March, is actually a theological Easter Egg that’s key to understanding the Lord of the Rings.

This date is the Feast of Annunciation, which in the liturgical calendar celebrates the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary to bring the news that she would give birth to the Messiah.

It’s also the traditional date of the Crucifixion. It’s one of several clues Tolkien scattered through the Lord of the Rings hinting at his deeper purpose.

Want another clue? We’re currently in the season of Lent, which in the run-up to Easter marks Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness. The Fellowship left Lothlorien 40 days before Sam and Frodo reached Mount Doom - their own wilderness wandering.

Why did Tolkien do this? In a letter, he described Lord of the Rings as a fundamentally Catholic and religious work - though he was careful to absorb the symbolism deeply into the story.

The ending of the book, where — spoiler alert! — Frodo takes the Ring, only for the quest to succeed because Gollum seizes it and falls into the fires of Mount Doom, was what Tolkien called eucatastrophe, a happy twist which he saw as the key characteristic of fairy stories.

Tolkien saw fairy story eucatastrophes as a far off gleam of the story of the Gospel, of God’s gracious rescue of humanity from sin through Jesus’ death and resurrection.

In his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tolkien described Jesus’ incarnation, God coming as a human being, as the Eucatastrophe of history, and the Resurrection, when Jesus rose from the dead, as the Eucatastrophe of the incarnation.

So one of the reasons Lord of the Rings resonates powerfully with so many is because it is reflecting something of the power of the Christian story.

Does that resonate with you? Let me know what you think — and how you’re marking Tolkien Reading Day.

I’ve also got lots of thoughts about Stephen Colbert’s involvement with another new Lord of the Rings film, but I’ll share about that another time soon - but let me know in the comments your first reactions!

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I’m excited that the video of this poem has been chosen as an exhibit at the Hadau Arts Exhibition in Cardiff, Wales, with the theme Holding the Future? “Hadau” is a Welsh word meaning “seeds” and I’ve

I’ll be at the exhibition opening this Saturday 7 March at 7pm, and is free with chance to meet many of the artists.

There’s also the upcoming Hadau Arts Conference on Saturday 21 March, with a special Urban Wordsmiths x Hadau spoken word evening the night before on Friday 20 March. More details of those after the poem!

If you’re in reach of Cardiff, it would be great to see you there (sorry international friends!

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As my friend , who will be speaking at the conference, says, “in times of crisis, make art”. And it certainly seems to me a fitting response to our uncertain times.

Scroll on down to read the poem and for more conference details!

Planet Planet Burning Bright

With apologies to William Blake, St John of Patmos, the Met Office
and future generations of the human race

Planet Planet Burning Bright
No forest left in thy dark night
What mortal hand or eye
Dare deface thy fearful glory?

In what distant deeps and skies
Burnt the fires of our desires?
On what shores dared we destroy?
What the hand, dared stoke the flames?

Cloudy with a chance of extinction
Flooding of a few homes and major population centres
is possible

Whose the hammers? whose the chains?
In whose furnace forged the acid rains?
When the sun throws down its rays
And boils oceans with its gaze:

Will we smile our work to see?
Will we who killed the Lamb kill thee?

Danger of substantial disruption to
Travel plans and human civilisation
Forecast of survival: moderate to poor

Is it time? A time for wrath?
For destroying those who destroy the earth?

Mountains fall on us
Hills cover us
The earth and everything done to it will be laid bare

Planet Planet Burning Bright
How can we stand in the Lamb’s sight?

Stormy with a chance of apocalypse
Take action now to keep yourself and others safe.

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Urban Wordsmiths x Hadau, Friday 20 March

Entrance is included with a Hadau conference ticket, or you can book for the evening alone here:

Book on Eventbrite

Hadau Conference, Saturday 21 March

Urban Crofters Church partners with Morphē Arts to host an Exhibition and a Conference to gather and deepen the conversation of arts and faith in Wales. Speakers include Adrienne Chaplin (philosopher of art) and (artist and author of Why Art Matters).

Programme:

Lanta Davis explores this in her book Becoming by Beholding: The Power of Imagination in Spiritual Formation. She is Professor of Humanities and Literature at Indiana Wesleyan University, and I’m delighted to have her join me to discuss her book and explore imaginative discipleship with me.

We dive into the historical roots of Christian imagination from icons to cathedrals to medieval bestiaries, and what they can teach us today.

Lanta Davis’ website: https://www.lantadavis.com

Buy Becoming by Beholding: Eden.co.uk, Baker Academic, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com

Follow Imaginative Discipleship

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imaginative.discipleship

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imaginative.discipleship

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@imaginative.discipleship

Timings

00:00 Intro

00:40 Becoming by Beholding

03:31 Why is the imagination important?

09:51 Icons and Seeing Jesus

17:16 Medieval Bestiaries and Wonder

20:45 Sacramental Imagination

24:19 Form Matters: Worship and Space

31:30 Dante and the Virtues

35:11 Modern Authors and Green Shoots

39:48 Contemplating Death

46:11 Practical Practices

If ‘beholding is becoming’, what are you giving your attention to that’s shaping you? What has helped you in your spiritual formation?

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Below is a poem in three movements from a time when I was wrestling with a deep sense of uncertainty around my faith — whatever your beliefs, I hope the theme of internal conflict will resonate on some level.

Bigger on the Inside includes a few different strands — written essays, Imaginative Discipleship podcast episodes, and occasional poetry. You can choose which sections you follow, depending on what’s most helpful to you, by updating your choices in your account settings.

Wrestling in the storm

1. Faith

A leap in the dark
A lover’s kiss
Betting my life on eternity’s stakes
Questioning obedience
Seeking understanding
A quest
A pilgrimage
A journey and a gift
Empty hands lifted up

Child-like hope
Adult-like perseverance
Keeping steady in life’s storms
Beyond reason yet reasonable
Where intellect gives way to relationship
Where thinking gives way to trusting
Where wondering gives rise to loving

Some say it’s madness
A delusion — illusion — epistemological confusion
But I find in it sanity
Some say intellectual suicide
I say death and rebirth
Giving up and gaining
A recognition of my limits
A receiving of the divine
The substance of things hoped for
The evidence of things not seen

A mystery
Fragile and unbreakable
Doubtful and certain
Individual and communal
The dark night of the soul
And shining cloud of witnesses

Not of myself
So that no-one can boast
A seed implanted
A signpost heavenward

Life.

2. Doubt

The storms come
And what I thought rock turns to sand
My house crumbles
If the foundations be destroyed
Who can stand?

Hope seems wishful thinking
Community seems confirmation bias
Certainty seems foolishness
Belief seems blindness
Where has my confidence gone,
Faded away like cut grass?

I oscillate — vacillate — hovering
Tossed with every wind
Between belief and despair
Deconstruction and reconstruction
Trusting and doubting

So many questions:
Is this real?
Is this true?
Is this good?

I cry out in the storm:

I believe, help my unbelief!

3. Calm

I think I believe, though I’m not always sure I do.

Two tunes overlap, clashing, competing
If I focus, one resolves
But I still hear the other
Rising to drown out the first.

Living cross-pressured
Caught in the multiverse of meaning
The universes next door
Colliding with my own.

Faith and doubt
Optimism and nihilism
Humanisms secular and sacred
Materialist ‘nothing buttery’
A universe of blind pitiless indifference
Realities objective or constructed.

But the mystery of existence
Seems too great a gift to have no-one to thank for

And the beauty of the Lamb
The self-giving one, dying and rising
Seems too good to be untrue.

So I might be wrong
But for today
I still choose to believe

No AI was used in the writing of this poem.

I’m more settled in my convictions currently, but I know what it’s like to feel tossed and turned between different viewpoints. If you’ve been through similar times of uncertainty and change in your beliefs, what was it like for you? Have you come through the storm yet, and how did you change along the way?

Recently I was struck by the relevance of Madeline L’Engle’s classic science fiction novel, A Wrinkle in Time, to the issue of AI. The book recently got a boost in attention by the references to it in season 5 of Stranger Things, with Holly Wheeler and friends using its ideas of Camazotz and the Black Thing to make sense of held captive under the control of the evil Vecna.

The novel’s themes of individuality and conformity seem to me prophetically relevant to a time when the misuse and overuse of AI threatens to swap human creativity with AI slop. What can we learn?

The power of the Black Thing

In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murray and her precocious younger brother Charles Wallace travel through time and space in search of their father. They arrive on the dark planet of Camazotz which is under the power of the Black Thing. Everyone there operate in robotic, society-wise conformity, under the power of IT, a disembodied brain with telepathic powers:

As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers.

Charles Wallace thinks that he is clever enough and strong enough to enter IT’s influence to rescue his father without becoming controlled by it. But his overconfidence is his undoing. He becomes enslaved to IT.

Meg Murray escapes but to rescue Charles Wallace, she must go back to confront IT. It’s her love for her brother, embodied and human, that is able to rescue him.

Is AI like the evil IT?

AI can be a powerfully useful tool, but when it comes to mass popular adoption of generative AI, I’m unconvinced that the benefits outweigh the costs. But I keep using it from time to time myself, thinking that I am clever enough and strong enough to enter AI’s influence without becoming controlled by it… Oh. Wait.

So I wonder. As much as I like to think I can use AI discerningly, am I fooling myself like Charles Wallace, overconfident in my own abilities?

Part of the danger of AI is its blandness, the lack of obvious errors and flaws. In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg is given “the gift of her faults”:

“Meg, I give you your faults.”

“My faults!” Meg cried.

“Your faults.”

“But I’m always trying to get rid of my faults!”

“Yes,” Mrs. Whatsit said. “However, I think you’ll find they’ll come in very handy…”
― Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Our imperfections make us individual and human. I’m talking here in a creative sense rather than a moral sense – moral goodness accentuates, rather than diminishes, our uniqueness. But the pseudo-correctness of AI irons out our individuality.

Rescued by embodied connection

So as a cautious AI-experimenter, rather than outright AI-rejecter, the danger of becoming captive to AI like IT, like the Black Thing is there.

But if I am going too far, I hope like Charles Wallace I’ll have friends and family who can pull me out, through embodied love and connection.

It’s by being human in community, through conversation, through the awkward, inconvenient, glorious business of doing life with other sinners, that we truly grow and can guard ourselves against the worst effects of AI.

The awkwardness of community

Someone said that one of the advantages of an AI chatbot is that you can share anything with it without judgment. But shouldn’t that be what we do as human beings in community, especially among those of us as Christians seeking to live as the church? Not being non-judgmental to the degree that we never challenge one another in unhealthy behaviours (and for those of us who are Christians, in what we understand from the Bible to be sin). But in giving one another space to be heard and supported without fear, and when we need to be challenged, to receive that from people who genuinely care for us.

In an age of isolation and disembodiment, in a time when technology threatens more than ever what C. S. Lewis called the “abolition of man”, let’s live in ways that show the best of what it means to be human in community together, with real communication, real relationships, real love.

Is AI a blandness-engine? Or do you think it can enhance creativity? Should I throw out AI from my life altogether, or am I being too cautious? Let me know what you think!

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Side note: What should we tell our kids about AI?

Tomorrow evening I’m going to be speaking to a youth group about AI at a church in Cardiff, and how engage wisely with it (or not).

While the AI-skeptical side of me is tempted to just tell them to flee from it, so that their developing minds can grow their own creativity and critical thinking first, I don’t think that’s actually the most helpful advice – not least because if I was a teenager, having an adult tell me not to do something would be a pretty big encouragement to carry on with that thing or to try it out!

So I’m going to try to give some ways of applying the ideas of the image of God and of idolatry in a way that can help them discern when it is harmful, and when it might be helpful. Hopefully it will give them some good things to think about!

My kids are 8, 6 and 3 years old, so not quite old enough for me to have to navigate this with them yet - though I’ll need to tackle the question of AI with them soon enough. If you’re a parent or teacher, how have you approached this?

• How the "knowledge as information" paradigm cuts us off from reality

• Michael Polanyi's concept of subsidiary-focal integration

• Why imagination is essential to all knowing (including science!)

• The relationship between attention, love, and knowledge

• How artful knowing can help us navigate crises of faith

• The doctrine of creation and wonder in the ordinary

• Re-enchantment vs. the “lively real”

• Comparing Esther's work with Iain McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere approach

Whether you're wrestling with doubt, seeking deeper understanding, or simply curious about how we know what we know, this conversation offers profound insights into making contact with reality.

Also available to watch on YouTube:

Timestamps

0:00 - Introduction & Opening Reflections

2:43 - Welcoming Esther Meek

4:23 - How did Esther come to philosophy?

8:35 - On navigating crises of faith

13:33 - How Polanyi helps us

17:32 - Subsidiary focal integration

20:57 - Attention, love and knowledge

29:23 - Is re-enchantment helpful?

42:15 - The creativity of logic

49:16 - Imagination and reason - one form of knowing?

53:33 - Imagination as a point of integration

57:02 - Practicing artful attention

1:02:09 - Concluding reflections

Books Mentioned

• Doorway to Artistry - Esther Lightcap Meek

• Longing to Know - Esther Lightcap Meek

• Loving to Know - Esther Lightcap Meek

• A Little Manual of Knowing - Esther Lightcap Meek

• Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi

• The Master and His Emissary - Iain McGilchrist

• The Matter with Things - Iain McGilchrist

• Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder

Connect with Esther Meek

https://www.estherlightcapmeek.com

https://facebook.com/estherlightcapmeek

https://twitter.com/esther_l_meek

https://instagram.com/estherlightcapmeek

Also mentioned

Hello and a special welcome to recent subscribers! The launch of season 2 of the Imaginative Discipleship podcast with my interview with Malcolm Guite has brought in a lot of new people. I hope you enjoy my written articles as much as the podcasts! And if you’ve not checked it out yet you can find it here:

But today I want to look back on one of my absolute highlights of 2025, which was participating in the C. S. Lewis International Interdisciplinary Conference in Romania. It also helps to serve as an introduction to the different threads of my interests – literature, imagination and Christian discipleship, from academic, popular and pastoral angles.

Just after the conference came the sad news that one of the speakers, James Como, had passed away — read on for my tribute to him below.

Why I went to the conference

Currently I’m doing the Growing Churches Programme with Wales Leadership Forum part-time to help me grow as an evangelist and cultural apologist here in Wales, alongside my freelance writing and editing.

The conference itself is multi-threaded, with academic, creative and community aspects to it. So it brought together multiple threads in my own interests and sense of calling, including academic, creative and Christian apologetics strands.

It’s a while since I was fully engaged in the world of academia – I did my English Literature MA, in which I focused on children’s literature and medievalism, especially Tolkien, Lewis and T H White, all the way back in 2010–11, and last gave an academic conference paper at the The Child and the Book conference in Cambridge all the way back in 2012(!). But I have very much remained engaged in thinking about Lewis and the Inklings, children’s literature, and Christian apologetics in more informal ways through the years.

C. S. Lewis has also figured into my freelance editing work – one of my projects earlier this year was editing Other Watchful Dragons: C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Cross-Cultural Apologetics by Jonathan M Parker (Wipf & Stock, out now - more on this soon!), which was a real delight to work on, as well as helpful for sharpening my understanding of the potential of narrative and imaginative apologetics!

Lewis’s staggering levels of polymath genius across academia, creative writing and Christian apologetics is both daunting and inspiring, and while I don’t dare aspire to ever be a “new C. S. Lewis” I hope that my mix of intellectual, creative and apologetics activities can in some way draw on his example, as befits my own modest gifts and moment in history.

The Romanian connection

You might wonder why an international C. S. Lewis conference is held in Romania – what’s the link? One of the fascinating aspects of the conference for me was discovering the strength of the local C. S. Lewis & Kindred Spirits Society. Much of the credit for the conference and the local interest in Lewis lies with organiser Denise Vasiliu, who has worked over many years to establish the event as a biannual fixture.

But she was planting in well-prepared cultural soil: Romanian Christians had read Lewis in secret during the Communist era, and Romanian readers found in the White Witch’s regime of spies and secret police a powerful resonance with their own experience.

In attendance at the conference was Teodora Ghiviriga, now an associate professor at the University of Alexandru Ioan Cuza in Iaşi, who had studied English and Romanian in the 1980s in the last days of the Communist regime. As a student, she had gone to the British Consul to ask for English books to read, and one of those she was given and read was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She gave it to one of her professors enthusiastically, who read it and who (if I remember the story correctly) went on to translate several of the Narnia books into Romanian – and who was herself present at the conference.

Conference highlights

Malcolm Guite - a poet in Narnia

My journey to the conference began auspiciously, ending up sat in the row in front of the wonderful poet Malcolm Guite.

Guite delivered one of my conference highlights with a epic poem retelling of parts of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written from the perspective of a Narnian court poet, which was homework he set for his school pupils as a teacher in the 1980s. (Perhaps when Malcolm has finished his Arthuriad, he can complete his Narnian poetic cycle ready for Lewis’s works to go out of copyright in 2034 - less than a decade to go now!)

You can watch him read some of his lost Narnia poem on YouTube:

Lewis’s Christian apologetics, Wales and publishing

Another talk I found particularly interesting was Dr Paul E. Michelson’s plenary about C. S. Lewis’s Christian apologetics, focusing on a lecture he gave on 1st April, 1945 to a conference for Church in Wales youth leaders and junior clergy in Carmarthen, Wales. The essay is collected in God in the Dock (published 1970) and while I’m sure I’ve read it before, realising the Welsh context piqued my interest particularly.

One point from Lewis’s lecture that Dr Michelson did draw out that I found interesting as an editor and publisher was Lewis’s suggestion about the apologetic need for books from an implicitly Christian perspective about everything:

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects with their Christianity latent… The first step to the reconversion of this country is a series, produced by Christians, which can beat the Penguin and the Thinkers Library on their own ground. Its Christianity would have to be latent, not explicit: and of course its science perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interest of apologetics would be sin and folly.

Part of my editorial grid for books when working as Publishing Director for IVP Books UK was precisely for “Christian books about everything”, though market realities make it harder for Christian books to break out of their niche than I would like. But I do think this is a genuine need and one that continues to be under-served.

And I think the challenge for me as a writer and sometime Christian cultural apologist is to make sure that I don’t spend too much time talking about Christianity, so much as engaging with all kinds of topics from a Christian perspective.

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Creative and community threads

Another aspect of the conference I particularly appreciated was the focus not just on ideas, but on creativity and community. Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson set a really positive tone early on by reminding us to not just see one another, and particularly the more distinguished speakers, as ‘resources’ to be mined for ideas and connections, but as people. The friendly, collegiate atmosphere and all the fascinating people and conversations I had were just so rich and encouraging. I daren’t start naming names because I’m sure to miss off people I loved conversing with, but everyone was a real delight to meet and begin to get to know.

Actually, I will mention one name, which is Owen A. Barfield, the grandson of Owen Barfield, member of the Inklings and friend of Tolkien and Lewis, whose ideas about language and imagination deeply influenced them. I’ve read Barfield’s Poetic Diction and Saving the Appearances and they were instrumental in moving me towards a sacramental, participatory view of symbols and reality. So it was fascinating to meet the younger Barfield, for whom the great thinker and writer was simply “Grandfather”, and who in adult life has stepped up to steward his grandfather’s legacy with care.

The conference also included an art exhibition, creative performances, poetry, music and more.

One of the plenary sessions involved a discussion of different people’s experiences of combining different types of work, such as academic and creative, and how these might form parts of one unified calling. For me, as I think through how to combine creativity, cultural engagement, Christian thinking and apologetics, this was a valuable discussion. And my heart was lifted by all the rich forms of creativity on display through the conference, especially the final concert on the Friday evening.

My contributions

My paper was Of Man’s First Disobedience: Childhood, maturity and the Fall in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

I explored the similarities between Lewis and Pullman as writers in the Romantic tradition, especially in their high view of imagination, while also the fundamental religious divide between Lewis’s Christianity and Pullman’s secular humanism, and how that plays out in their treatment of themes of temptation and Fall, especially drawing on Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as Genesis.

The paper seemed well-received and I hope to share an adapted version of it here on my newsletter in due course!

I also enjoyed the opportunity to share some of my creative work as a poet in the open mic sessions on the Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, including my poem ‘Bigger on the Inside’ which you can read here:

Remembering James Como

A shadow was cast in the wake of the conference with the news that James Como, one of the plenary speakers and a founding member of the New York C. S. Lewis society, had passed away in Bucharest on his journey back home.

Como had spoken eloquently on the last day of the conference about C. S. Lewis’s Great Conversation, emphasising the towering genius of Lewis’s polyphonic voice, being outstanding as a scholar, as a storyteller and as a Christian apologist. Como identified three melodic lines in Lewis’s work, what he called the militant, marvellous and mystical, which were in constant conversation.

Como argued that Lewis’s mysticism is often overlooked, and that as much as Lewis delighted in quick-witted debate and cold-blooded reason, he was also a mystic, “from the depths of his soul to the heights of heaven”.

One of my abiding regrets of the conference will be that I didn’t get round to talking to Como personally, who was clearly a brilliant mind himself (there were lots of fascinating people to meet!) Now I’ll have to wait until I reach Aslan’s country to engage with Como in the ‘great conversation’ flowing out of C. S. Lewis’s life and works.

What will I take away from the conference?

The conference was very enriching intellectually, spiritually and creatively. I have no doubt that seeds planted at the conference will bear fruit: intellectually, creatively, and through friendships started or deepened.

Particularly helpful for me was seeing C. S. Lewis’s multifaceted achievements. While I am no Lewis, I’m finding the shape of my own multisided calling, and it was wonderful to be in a place where different threads in my sense of calling – intellectual, creativity, apologetics – converged so naturally.

What fruit will grow from it? New ideas and inspiration, certainly; ongoing relationships, hopefully. But only time - and the Spirit’s working – will tell.

Edited to add: Join me for an online Galahad and the Grail book group, starting Monday April 13th:

Sign up for book group

Welcome to season 2 of the Imaginative Discipleship podcast - exploring meaning, imagination and transformation for Christians and the spiritually curious!

In this episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Malcolm Guite, a poet, priest and scholar who has thought deeply about the imagination. Discover how imagination can unveil our sight to see reality more deeply.

Guite is also soon to release the first book in Merlin’s Isle, his epic poetic retelling of the story of King Arthur. We got into all sorts of interesting topics from dinosaurs to Doctor Who to dragons.

So listen in and let me know what you think in the comments!

Episode 2 is also now available:

This episode is also available to watch on the Imaginative Discipleship YouTube channel.

Subscribe now

Malcolm Guite

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MalcolmGuitespell

• Twitter: twitter.com/malcolmguite

• Facebook: facebook.com/malcolm.guite

• Blog: malcolmguite.wordpress.com/blog

Malcolm Guite’s books discussed

• Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God - Canterbury Press (UK); Amazon.com

• Merlin’s Isle Book 1: Galahad and the Grail, illustrated by Stephen Crotts - Preorder from the Rabbit Room (US); Preorder from Canterbury Press (UK)

• Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination - Routledge

Arthurian literature and criticism

• Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

• Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae

• Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

• T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King

• Roger Lancelyn Green, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table

• The Inklings and Arthur, edited by Sørina Higgins

Lecture Podcast—English L'Abri

King Arthur and the Dangerous Dream of Christendom (Caleb Woodbridge, Writer & Editor)

According to the legends, King Arthur was the Christian king of a Christian kingdom. But as the story has been retold in a post-Christendom culture, that's often been radically reinvented. How can the legend of Arthur help us think about the tension between the two cities, the city of man and city of God? How does the Arthurian mythos give us an index o…

Listen now

2 years ago · 1 like

Also mentioned

• C S Lewis - Surprised by Joy, The Chronicles of Narnia, “Three Ways of Writing for Children”

• G K Chesterton - The Ballad of the White Horse

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Biographia Literaria

• James K A Smith - Desiring the Kingdom

• Esther Meek - Loving to Know; The Mother’s Smile

• Sir James Frazer - The Golden Bough

Episode timings

0:00 Intro

0:42 Welcome to Imaginative Discipleship Season 2

2:36 Welcoming Malcolm Guite

6:18 Imagination as Organ of Meaning

10:23 Creativity and the Image of God

16:39 Discerning True Imagination

23:25 Baptized Imagination and Death to Self

27:56 Chronicles of Narnia and Doctor Who

31:41 Epic Poetry, Merlin's Isle and Mythopoetic Storytelling

41:17 Favourite Arthurian Tellings

55:13 Arthur, England, and National Identity

59:32 Retelling Arthurian Legend

1:01:22 The Growing Imaginative Resistance

Normally I like to come at philosophical and theological questions sideways via story and culture, but I don’t mind sometimes engaging with big questions directly, and that’s just what I did with this debate:

Back in November, I debated John Richards, head of Atheism UK on the question of “Do we need God for ultimate meaning?” (Which was a bit of a surprise on the day, since due to a miscommunication, I’d thought I was going to be debating “Is belief in God rational?” – nothing like keeping me on my toes!)

Now I tend to prefer conversations over debates – I enjoy the intellectual back-and-forth of a debate, but I find it often sets up an oppositional framework of “winning” and “losing” that isn’t necessarily the best frame for searching for truth together. But I certainly think there is a place for debates, where people set out the best case they can for their viewpoint, as long as they are approached with intellectual integrity.

I was impressed by the audience of school pupils who gave up their lunchtime to watch the debate, and who asked thoughtful, challenging questions. It’s great to see a new generation engaging these big questions!

How did I do? Well, why not watch the debate and decide for yourself!

You can watch it on YouTube (above), download the podcast audio from Premier, or find it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I’d love to hear your perspective on the debate, whichever side of it you come down on. Perhaps we can pick up and continue some of the threads in the comments below…

Leave a comment

Quick pop culture thoughts

• I’m currently enjoying Pluribus on Apple TV, an intriguing sci-fi show about Carol Sturka, one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t get absorbed into a peaceful, happy hive-mind, and who sets about trying to undo whatever it is that happened to the human race. It’s a smart, deliberately paced show from Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad fame.

• The new Knives Out movie Wake Up, Dead Man is really good and richly engaged with questions of religion, power, belief and grace! My wife and I saw it together in the cinema and found it surprisingly emotionally resonant. My friend-from-Hutchmoot Houston Coley wrote a great essay exploring these themes:

Houston, We Have a Problem

Rian Johnson's 'Knives Out' Movies Are All About God

Spoilers for all three ‘Knives Out’ mysteries abound below. This essay was originally posted on my Letterboxd…

Read more

8 months ago · 13 likes · H. Coley

Earlier this year, I took part in the UK Moot creative community’s Pass the Piece, where participants created a piece of art (whether visual art or poetry or prose or music…) to pass it on for someone else to respond to (as well as receiving someone else’s piece for our own creative response).

I came up with a poem that riffs on the title of this newsletter and my love of Narnia and Doctor Who, which the wonderfully-talented author and storyteller Amy Scott Robinson wrote a response to. Here are both poems – I hope you enjoy them, and thanks to Amy for permission to share hers publicly here!

Pass the Piece

Bigger on the Inside

A wardrobe is a snowy kingdom
And a police box is a time machine

A book is an adventure in time and space
A journey to other realms and minds

A story is a cosmos incognito
A view of the universe shared

A word is an open doorway
To wonders and worlds unknown

A poem is thing with dimensions
Hidden and deep beyond

A metaphor is a myth in miniature
An explosion of meaning that blooms

A person is a story that’s living
Containing thoughts and dreams immense

A kindness is an incarnation
Of the love that moves sun and stars

A world is a signpost
To things unseen

A prayer a hinge
On which history turns

A loaf of bread is the body
Broken so we might be unbroken

A cup of wine is the blood is the life
Is the love at the heart of the universe.

by Caleb Woodbridge

A word is a doorway (and a prayer is a hinge)

And he replied, ‘Join me
in this metaphor. It’s a myth in miniature,
a parable’s seed,’

and he pointed to the plate on the table.
Looking, she saw with his eyes:
starving wanderers
manna from heaven
five thousand hungry children
twelve baskets left over
a broken body
two at Emmaus starting to their feet.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘even the dogs will eat
the crumbs that the children brush off.’

She looked into the eyes of the word,
and he, with the world in his sights
smiled back and opened the door.

by Amy Scott Robinson
(www.amyscottrobinson.com)

Reminder: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at 75 livestream, Thursday 8pm

Join me for a book group style livestream discussing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe! If you’d like to take part in the discussion live on YouTube, register below and I’ll send details of how to join the call:

Register

Prayer letter

I plan to send out my first prayer letter / ministry update this weekend to supporters of my work with the Growing Churches Programme, doing Christian creative cultural engagement in Wales.

If this is of interest to you, please sign up for it separately at newsletter.calebwoodbridge.com.

I’m excited that I’ll be off to the C.S. Lewis International Interdisciplinary Conference next month! I also took part in a Discarded Image reading group on YouTube recently, discussing Lewis’s book about the Medieval worldview. I’m also hosting an online Narnia book group soon – register here. Or scroll down for more details of each.

But first, my celebration of 75 years of Narnia!

My adventures in Narnia

Today marks 75 years since the publication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published 16th October 1950.

I was only about five years old when I first stepped through the wardrobe into Narnia. Not literally, of course. But when my mum first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to me, something happened to shape my imagination indelibly.

Under Narnia’s spell

I was captured by this amazing world of talking beasts and mythical creatures, by the possibility of as a child stumbling into a magical land and becoming a king there.

I was entranced by the character of Aslan, “not safe, but good”.

I was stirred by the stories, from Aslan’s sacrifice for Edmund in the first book, all the way through to the heroic, helpless last stand of Tirian, Jill and Eustace in The Last Battle, only to be alive again in Aslan’s country: the term time was over, the holidays begun, indeed.

That melancholic sense of fighting, in Tolkien’s words, “the long defeat” of history, combined with fairy-tale, eucatastrophic hope impressed itself on my young mind powerfully.

Longing for Narnia

I longed to visit Narnia for myself. I checked the back of my own wardrobe, looked for hidden portals.

There was one particular branch that came down in my infant school playground in some winds, with a split in two. Pointing downwards to the ground, it made an inverted ‘V’ like a natural archway: just the thing that felt as if it should be one of the ‘chinks and chasms’ that Aslan hinted connected our world to Narnia, that were almost gone but not quite.

I knew Narnia was ‘just’ a story, but as a young Christian, I prayed fervently to God that somehow he would make Narnia real so that I could visit it. I knew from the Bible that God had created this world with a word: if I asked nicely enough, surely God could recreate Narnia based on C. S. Lewis’s words?

He didn’t oblige me, of course. Neither did the trees answer me, or the robins in my garden speak to me, or dwarves or dryads appear amongst the Welsh hills where I grew up, as believable as it seemed that they could be hiding there.

Later, I would encounter Lewis’s ‘argument from desire’, that if I have a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, it shows I was made for another world. And maybe one day, in the New Creation, in Aslan’s Country, we will indeed get to experience ‘the real Narnia’: not a literal recreation but the source of those desires, where we are restored to perfect harmony with woods and waters, beasts and spirits, and above all God himself. But not now, not yet.

When I was a little older, I started writing my own retelling of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which I became part of the story through the power of an enchanted Blue Peter badge. As I grew, I started writing stories of my own that took less direct inspiration from Narnia: tales of magic and other worlds, of good versus evil and of courage and heroism.

Deeper magic

I also began to realise one of the dimensions in which Narnia is ‘bigger on the inside’: the Christian themes and imagery that Lewis embedded in the story.

Some readers have felt short-changed by discovering Aslan is a ‘magic Jesus lion’, and I can sympathise with that feeling. I remember feeling a perhaps analogous sense of disappointment as a kid when I read an article in a newspaper that I read in my local library that pointed out some of the implied Blairite politics of the Harry Potter series – not that I necessarily had a coherent political disagreement with Rowling’s politics, but I felt that somehow the magic and escapism was ‘sullied’ by these real-world concerns.

Of course, by now I’m much more aware of how all fiction is inevitably embedded within philosophical and often political outlooks. But I can understand having some sense of underhandedness when the penny drops about aspects of a story that the author was “up to” without it previously being obvious.

But for me, Lewis’s defence that Aslan is not allegory, but ‘supposal’, a speculation about how God might become incarnate within a world like Narnia, made sense to me as a young Christian with an active imagination and love of speculative fiction.

For me, the flavour of Christianity added “deeper magic”, a grandeur and substance. to the Narnia books; Narnia, in turn, brought to life aspects of the Christian life that might have been difficult or abstract for me to grasp, such as God’s holiness, with the giddy mix wonder and fear that came with meeting Aslan a worthy preparation for grasping the beauty and fullness of awe that come in encountering God.

A baptised imagination

Having encountered a deeply-felt sense of the wild beauty and goodness of God through Narnia helped inoculate me against some of the attacks on Christianity I would encounter growing up.

I read and enjoyed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels though with diminishing pleasure as his atheistic subtext became text, with what seems to me a blundering note of preachiness far worse than any of Lewis’s far more minor crimes against subtlety.

The figure of “The Authority”, the version of God that Pullman rejected as austere, dusty, and tired, bore little resemblance to Aslan, or indeed to Jesus, and so the critique fell short: I didn’t believe in the God that Pullman didn’t believe in either.

And perhaps that’s one of the reasons Pullman objected to Narnia so deeply, for the crime of “baptising the imaginations” of children with stories that might prime young minds to receive the Christian faith as beautiful and true.

A doorway into literature

As I grew older, Narnia became something more: a doorway into myth and literature. I followed Lewis and Tolkien upstream into the worlds of Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, and as I studied literature at university, to Milton, Spenser, Mallory, de Lorris, Dante, Boethius and others.

I loved reading as a child, as I still do, even with my brain at least half-addled by the age of smartphones and social media; I’m sure if it hadn’t been Narnia then other stories would have filled the gap and drawn me in, though my path and my interests would undoubtedly have been different.

But Narnia was my first love, the first children’s novels I read, beyond picture books and simple tales, that first enchanted me.

An enlargement of self

After all, that’s the power of good storytelling: the tale is not only bigger on the inside than the out, like the wardrobe to Narnia or the stable door to Aslan’s country.

But good stories also help make you “bigger on the inside”, inculcating knowledge, curiosity and courage.

It was in Narnia that I learned what it was like to slay a wolf and clean my sword after; to submit to the Lion’s claws as he performed my undragoning; to go cheerfully to a last battle with no hope of victory; to seek after the sweet light of the Utter East.

Handing on to the next generation

And now as a parent, I recently got to experience them in a new way again, reading them aloud to my daughter, who is now eight years old. She is quiet and thoughtful, taking things to heart and keeping her own counsel, so whether they have had the same impact on her as they did on me at her age remains to be seen. But she has heard these stories read to her with love and delight, and our times reading together are precious.

Along the way, many were the times when I had to hold back my tears as I reread them, from the death and rebirth of Aslan, to the singing of Narnia into being, to the end of Narnia and the beginning of the great story that goes on forever.

I hand on Narnia with joy, and hope that a new generation will get at least some measure of the same richness out of them as I did.

And perhaps too it will be a doorway into bigger worlds: those of literature and myth, yes, but also into what Lewis saw as the Great Story, the true myth of Christ born, crucified and risen again.

What does Narnia mean to you? Did it inspire your imagination, and were the Christian themes a highlight or a turn-off for you? Let me know in the comments!

Leave a comment

Join me for a 75th Narnia anniversary livestream – Thursday 30th October, 8-9pm GMT

I’m going to try something new! I’ll be running an online book group style chat about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in two weeks’ time.

I’m planning to host a livestream to discuss The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to mark its 75th anniversary. All perspectives welcome, whether critical or celebratory, Christian or from other belief perspectives, as long as you engage respectfully in the discussion.

The discussion will be live-streamed on my Imaginative Discipleship YouTube channel and available publicly afterwards. If you would like to take part in the discussion, or just to register your interest as a viewer, please fill out the form:

Register here

Meet me at the C S Lewis International Interdisciplinary Conference in November

I’m excited to have had a paper on childhood, maturity and the Fall in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials accepted for this C. S. Lewis conference in Iași, Romania next month — and some creative contributions poetry-wise too! Off to Romania next month for 19-22 November.

Find out more

Watch me talking Lewis and medievalism on YouTube

I am Boy

I am Boy
I am Two
The world is mine
I’m sure it’s true
Daddy sometimes forgets who’s Boss
And Mummy is a total loss

Sometimes she will stop me from
Jumping in muddy puddles
But she is good for snuggly cuddles
And her milk is something special
When she can be prevailed upon
With my cries
And imprecations

I like dinosaurs
OMP OMP OMP
Listen to my might
RAAAR
Hear me from near and far

I am Bold
I am Strong
Except when I meet
A worm that’s long
AAAAAAH!
Why couldn’t my parents see
That thing might have eaten me?

I like Snacks
And beans on toast
Jam and Cookies
And when I’m in the mood
Bits of Mummy and Daddy’s food
And when I want something more
I pick some bits up from the floor
Yum!

Mum and Dad, poor simple fools
Often don’t know what I choose
So I have to point and scream
To demand breakfast ice cream
Sometimes they can be quite thick
Persistence sometimes does the trick
But other times they just don’t get it
So I have no choice
But to reprimand
Their failure
To meet my demand
AAAAAAAH

I am Boy
I am Two
I put stones in your shoe
My experiments empirical
Get spoiled by interference parental

I like Trains
CHOO CHOO CHOO
I love to run and play with you
I must insist you don’t get distracted
By work or friends or phones or chores
By adult conversations or other bores

I am Boy
I am Two
All that I ask of you
My parents
Is your total attention
Focus in every dimension
Your unbounded love and affection

I am Boy
I’m never tired
I am sometimes very wired

I am Boy
I don’t need bed
I’m not sleepy
I’m a dinosaur
Listen to
My mighty…
SNORE