His books are selling more than 6 million copies a year, new special editions of "The Screwtape Letters" and "A Grief Observed" are due out this year, and this November, he will join Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and Chaucer as writers buried or commemorated in Westminster Abbey's Poets Corner. It is, literally, the year of C. S. Lewis.

One of the best ways to dismiss the ideas of others, without ever having to think about them, is to label them as quickly as they are uttered. Some roads to hell may be paved with good intentions, but others are made smooth by a flippant bigotry that avoids truth by stereotyping.

Light on the nature of the world can come from any source, whether it is C.S. Lewis or his polar opposite, Richard Dawkins, or simply a song I hear on the radio. In any case, if there is truth to what I hear, I would be foolish to ignore it.