Aubrey Buster 2025 Hansen Lectures

January 30, 2025 - "C.S. Lewis and the Apocalyptic Imagination"

Respondent: Danielle Corple, Associate Professor of Communication

Much of C.S. Lewis’s fiction deals with themes of endings and life beyond these endings. In the midst of contentious theories of doctrine about the end of the world, Lewis consistently chooses to reflect on “the end” through stories, stories that take place in alternate realms and imagined futures. In this way, Lewis joins a great tradition of theological thinkers extending back to the early Jewish and Christian authors who responded to the incoherence of their present experience through heavily symbolic narratives, divinely granted visions, and imagined dialogues between great figures of the past and supernatural beings. In this lecture, I trace the development of Lewis’s use of story to imagine distinctively Christian endings, including his development of biblical images, his interaction (often polemical) with contemporary biblical scholarship on “apocalypticism,” and his presentation of “story” as the proper form for imagining human ends.

Following the lecture, there will be a book launch/signing for Dr. Jeffrey  Barbeau’s The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology, the eighth volume in the Hansen Lectureship series, published by InterVarsity Press Academic.

February 27, 2025 - "'Here be Dragons': C.S. Lewis and the Construction of the Monstrous"

Respondent: John Walton, Professor of Old Testament Emeritus

Like generations of apocalyptic imaginaries before him, Lewis presents the social and religious threats of his age through the constructions of monsters. This lecture will describe the function of the monstrous within Lewis’s visions of the end. The imagined monstrous also constructs as its counterpart imagined glory. Thus, our examination of the distorted, the vulgar, and the evil, will provide a transition to the final lecture, which is an examination of the construction of Christian hope.

April 10, 2025 - "C.S. Lewis, the End(s) of Desire, and the Construction of Hope"

Respondent: Esau McCaulley, Jonathan Blanchard Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology

Lewis does not claim to be a theologian of eschatology, presenting or establishing a doctrine concerning the end of the world. Instead, he uses the “end times” scene, whether in an imagined post-war England, the fantasy world of Narnia, or in a dream vision to imagine either an (magnificently) ideal or (grotesquely) unideal future. In this lecture, I will argue that both Lewis and the writers of ancient Jewish apocalypse used the construction of endings to shape communal desire and to motivate communal hope. Lewis’s repeated appeal to “longing” and “desire” as primary religious categories reveal an orientation to the end shared with the apocalyptic tradition. The apocalyptic scenario has been used to influence a community’s imagination of the ideal world, and to encourage its readers and hearers to act collectively towards this future of flourishing. I will argue that Lewis uses stories imagining ends to re-orient his reader’s longings and desires in the present, a goal that he shares with the earliest authors of apocalyptic texts.