Reply #7: Phillip Pullman, who I admire as an author, has similar issues with Narnia

[nemo137]

I enjoyed this response to him, which I found on ALDaily.

If Pullman is right, not only should mainstream moviegoers stay away from Lion, so should evangelical Christians. "The highest virtue, we have on the authority of the New Testament itself," the avowedly atheistic Pullman said in a recent interview about the movie, "is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the books."

But is Pullman right?
<snip>
Lewis's motives for writing The Chronicles were more complex. Did he, as Pullman charges, intend them to be "propaganda for the religion he believed in"?
<snip>
Lewis's approach in The Chronicles was deeply rooted in his own experience. A crucial element in his conversion was a long conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien in which Lewis became persuaded that the many and, to him, deeply moving ancient myths in which a god dies and is reborn to save his people had "really happened" when Jesus was crucified and resurrected, placing Christianity squarely at the intersection of myth and history. Lewis had an enormous regard for pagan myths, both for their marvelous stories and for the truths about origins, aspirations, and purpose he found embedded in them. In writing The Chronicles, in which the divine lion Aslan is slain to save a treacherous child and then triumphantly resurrected, Lewis was trying to write a myth of his own that had all the excitement and truth of other myths, including the Christian one.

Full Article Here
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=84bgxkbbzvqrch10g3kbwp5g8kv3ccbn