In the Atlantic today (here), Aaron Cline Hanbury attempts to account for Lewis’ persistence in contemporary thought, literary and otherwise. He writes,
This vision for a Christian lens to the world permeates Lewis’s stories, because, for him, the best stories hinted at the deep structures of reality, helping humanity in the journey for truth and significance. Good stories point to an ultimate story. And as Farrer—but few else—might have predicted, Lewis appears more relevant today than ever.
Truth and significance, yes, but much more than that. The truth and significance has a particular sense in Lewis’s storytelling; it is particularly Christian, nested in the gospel of Jesus Christ and its particular way of redeeming the world. Surely, the allegory of Narnia begs interpretation, but with such interpretation one shouldn’t rush past the gospel to the more abstract terms of truth and significance.
Hanbury ends well, citing Aldous Huxley and John Kennedy who both died on the same day as Lewis.
Huxley once wrote that “the prophet must make a selection of the facts that are more significant, that will have the greatest effect on the greatest number of future human beings.” And Kennedy famously said that a “man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”
And that’s why, in 1963, Lewis left us a legacy with influence that reaches far beyond 1960s England: He wedded significant facts with ideas that live on.
The rest here.