C.S. Lewis Had a Gender Theory. Josh Herring Found It.
We live in a time when the word “gender” has become one of the most contested in our language. It’s hard to find anyone willing to think about it with both rigor and imagination. On this week’s episode of Acton Line, I spoke with Josh Herring, professor of humanities and classical education at Thales College, about his new book Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender, published by the Davenant Institute.
Is it fair to call C.S. Lewis a gender theorist? Josh makes a compelling case that it is although what Lewis means by gender and what contemporary gender ideology means by it are very different things. Lewis’s vision is rooted in an older tradition, one that draws on medieval cosmology, Christian theology, and the moral imagination rather than the categories of modern social constructionism.
What I found most rewarding about this conversation is how it moves across the whole range of Lewis’s work. We talk about the Narnia chronicles, the Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces, The Four Loves, The Abolition of Man, and even Lewis’s lesser-known literary scholarship on Spenser. Gender was woven into the fabric of Lewis’s imaginative and philosophical vision of reality.
We also get into what Lewis’s critics consistently get wrong, and whether or not Lewis had a conception of the divine feminine.
Give it a listen or a watch:
🎙️ Show notes and links at Acton.org
📖 Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve from the Davenant Institute
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