Colin Duriez, Scholar and Author

I first met British author and scholar Colin Duriez at the 2007 Oxonmoot conference at the University of Oxford where he was a featured speaker. For the past ten years, Duriez’s writings and observations on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Inklings have informed not only how I view the human imagination, but how it has a role in guiding us towards many basic Christian truths. In the following lecture, Duriez discusses the interesting reasons on why Lewis turned in the late 1940s from the Christian apologetic writings (that had made him famous) to composing more stories and works of literature such as the popular Narnia series and his acclaimed novel Till We Have Faces. Duriez’s discusses Lewis’s ‘quest for the real’ that led the Christian author from argument in defense of the faith to poetic storytelling for the purpose of ‘bringing words back to the actual’ so that they could once again convey their truest sense of indelible meaning.