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.

Great stories make us feel as though we are not alone, and these stories offer us the opportunity to enter into stories of great suffering -- and to cultivate the fervent belief that suffering will somehow, someday, pass.

I've been asked to write about theology and violence after every recent mass shooting, and I am sick to death of doing so, but the Newtown shootings feel different to me.

That innate tendency toward finding what we're already looking for is why now, since returning to a faith that saved my life, I try to listen, not just talk.