At a time when real Christianity desperately needed real explanation, C.S. Lewis provided it in Mere Christianity, which was a series of radio talks given during the Second World War. In these “Broadcast Talks,” Lewis spoke not as a famous scholar, but in the everyday language of his fellow citizens, sharing with them the basic Christian teachings  he had come to know and rely on since his own conversion in 1930. The talks brought forth an enormous popular response and a demand that they be put into print at once. The resulting book, Mere Christianity, became an immediate best seller and has remained continuously in print for 51 years since. Mere Christianity has been responsible for thousands of conversions 0f unbelievers and thousands of spiritual renewals among believers, both Catholic and Protestant.

Rejecting the boundaries that divide Christianity’s many denominations, Lewis finds a common ground on which all Those who have Christian faith can stand together. “Ever since I became a Christian,” he notes in the preface, “I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.

And what an explanation he goes on to provide, pointing the way to that ground “at the center of each [denomination where] there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (New York, Harper Collins, 1980) Mere Christianity