STRONGWILLED

D.L. and Krispin discuss The Last Battle in the last episode of the series, and D.L. reads an essay we wrote together about the parallels between The Last Battle and American Christianity.Our 6th season, Shamecore Records is coming in March! Join us at our Patreon for some patreon-only episodes until then!

Krispin and Danielle interview artist, Tomatobird about the comic she wrote about Tash from The Last Battle titled "Inexorable" and available to read here.You can follow her on instagram, twitter and tumbler, support her on Patreon, and buy prints of her work in her online store.SHAMECORE RECORDS will be the 6th season of our podcast. Listen to the trailer here, and if you love (or loved) heavy Christian music, leave us a voicemail!Have any lingering questions about Narnia? We are wrapping up next week, so hit us up with questions on twitter or at propheticimaginationstation@gmail.com.A few highlights from our conversation:Was C.S. Lewis a univeralist? Sort of. Discussed the book Roar!: A Christian Family Guide To The Chronicles Of NarniaTaylor points out that having some good brown people doesn’t make The Last Battle not racist, it’s just tokenism. The idea that myths point to Jesus is invalidating… “your beliefs and stories are valuable because they are secretly about Jesus and you don’t know it yet.” This book bring up the question: Is death good? The Pevenses watch the world end and its a positive experience. Calormen gets all the criticism for sacrifice, while there’s a sacrificial slab (stone table) right in the middle of Narnia.Religion often pushes away death anxiety, so we don’t get a chance to make peace with it.   Much of the time, Lewis was having fun… he wasn’t THAT intentional.Lewis’ themes are beyond Christianity.  We can see the limits of Lewis’ imagination, and where his imagination pushed the limits of his context. Racism in The Last Battle is possibly worst than Horse & His Boy.Is Tash Satan? That’s certainly up for debate.Taylor believes that Narnia is a world of henotheism, where western gods are good characters, eastern gods are not. 

D.L. and Krispin take a break from Narnia to reflect on four years of our podcast analyzing evangelical media - and how conspiracy themes are woven throughout!We discuss how to navigate relationships when you those in your life dismiss the significance of this event.D.L. explains the relational follow-out that occurred in Germany, as D.L. discusses the book Frauen by Owings.If you were disappointed with your church's response yesterday (Sunday Jan 10) to this insurrection, it's unlikely to get any better from here on out. It’s super important to find a supportive spiritual community, if you’re able to!

Torri Williams Douglass is a writer, speaker, educator, and activist. She is the creator of White Homework which is a curriculum designed to help people create their own personalized antiracism plan. The courses were developed as a response to the hundreds of requests she got from individuals asking, “I don’t want to be racist, but what do I DO?” Prior to this, she worked in higher ed, doing recruitment for Underrepresented Minorities in STEM. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon. Also she’s a great twitter follow. “The Chronicles of Narnia was required reading for homeschoolers.”Anyone else remember Abeka homeschool curriculum?! D.L. wrote this piece on reading Little House on the Prairie with kids. "Aslan is a drama queen"… (remember how Mr. Whitaker, drama queen for the patriarchy in Season 4 of Prophetic Imagination Station?)Rereading our childhood favorites actually is a good place to start reading with a decolonize lens. We are already comfortable with them - but it takes a lot of extra time. Krispin grew up with Hannah Barbarra Bible videos like these. No art is perfect - but sometimes it’s not worth the energy and time it takes to wade through it.Krispin mentions Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly Daniel Tatum

Matt Mikalatos took more time to talk with us about Narnia and C.S. Lewis, with lots of interesting parts we haven't covered in our series - like an eco-critical reading of Narnia, guessing Lewis' enneagram number, Planet Narnia, and how Lewis wrote letters to children explaining the Narnia series in ways he never made public.Thank you Matt and patrons for a wonderful evening! You can sign up and be a part of events like these, and more, at www.patreon.com/dlmayfield

Paul Pastor is an editor and writer, and has published a collection of non-ficiton essays about the Holy Spirit called The Face of the Deep and some books of prayers & meditations called The Listening Day Volume 1 and Volume 2. You can find him on Twitter. Or go to his website and write him a letter!Become a patreon of the podcast at www.patreon.com/dlmayfield and join us for a Narnia Q&A Wednesday night, Dec 16 (6pm pacific / 9pm eastern). The Highlights:Aslan’s How: a house put together by Dr. Garry Friesan for male students attending Multnomah University (Multnomah Bible College when we went there).Paul mentions the best box set being this one and we agree. Lewis’ favorite author/theologian was named George McDonald. He was a Victorian era preacher and fantasy writer known for his heretical views. Phantastes by MacDonald, Lewis said, “baptized his imagination”. The Silver Chair synopsis. The Silver Chair also includes one of the best characters in Lewis’ canon, PuddleglumMichael Ward wrote a book on the Narnia stories being linked to medieval conceptions of various planets. Check out his website, Planet Narnia. Why hasn’t The Silver Chair been made into a major motion picture?The Silver Chair corresponds to Luna, or the moon. The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross is an initiatory moment.Holy Darkness is different and holds richness because they dwell in obscurity or shadow, which is present in Godself. The Scriptures say that God dwells in deep darkness. 

Alireza Shafiee-Nasab, born in 1990 in Dezful, Iran, is an Iranian translator, literary editor and teacher. You can follow him Instagram or visit his website http://shafieenasab.ir.He holds an MA degree in English literature from the University of Tehran, with a thesis entitled “Christianized Archetypes in The Chronicles of Narnia”, in which he argues that the psychological ideas of Carl Gustav Jung might have influenced Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, while Lewis, as a devout Christian, gives these ideas a Christian touch, modifying them wherever they contradict Christian doctrines. He is currently translating Fernando Aramburu’s Patria into PersianCalormen is the country south of Narnia in the books--appearing most prominently in The Horse and His Boy and also The Last Battle. Calormen is obviously an Eastern/Oriental culture compared to Narnia’s northern European culture. Calormen culturally, according to Shafiee-Nasab, is a mixture of Arabic and Persian and Turkish elements: long beards and dark skin and upturned shoes. “Aslan” comes from a Turkish word which means lion. It’s also the name of one of the characters in Arabian Nights, a work which greatly influenced C. S. Lewis. Other influences from this book show up in Narnia, including naming the boy prince Caspian after the Caspian Sea.Lewis was interested in psychology but was not a fan of Freud. But he found Carl Jung to have a more humane version of psychology. Shafiee-Nasab believes Lewis’ interest in Jung contributes to some of the archetypes in his work, including the figures of Aslan and Tash--and how people end up responding to a false Aslan because of their mental image of his. Lewis was also influenced by Dante, and possibly by his depiction of Islam in in works. Along with that, in old Persian Tash (the God of death in the Narnia world) means fire. How do we deal with the orientalism/racism underlying works like The Horse and His Boy? One thing we can do is wonder why there was such an appetite for works like Narnia while Persian/Islamic epics continue to be ignored. One such example is that one of the most famous Irianian books ever written--The Epic of Kings--still has yet to be completely translated into English. 

Kat Coffin is a musician and an academic specializing in the works of C.S. Lewis and gender theory. Before you listen to the podcast, maybe check out this wonderful summary Kat Coffin wrote on The Problem of Susan here.Or read this quick Twitter thread summary Here’s the passage in The Last Battle that makes people so upset about Susan not getting into Aslan’s Country. JK Rowling on Susan Pevensie and Lewis: “There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.”Neil Gaiman wrote a short story called The Problem of Susan (which we do not necessarily recommend reading as it is . . . intense.)C.S. Lewis was a lot like Susan!Lewis eventually became friends with Dorothy L Sayers and then befriended and married Joy Davidman. An American communist from Brooklyn! Till We Have Faces--Lewis’ last novel, which was basically co-written with Joy DavidmanA Grief Observed--Lewis’ book on his marriage“CS Lewis is not as evangelical as evangelicals want him to be but he’s not as progressive as I want him to be.” -- Kat CoffinGeorge MacDonald, one of Lewis’ main literary mentors, was a universalist. Krispin mentions The Evangelical Universalist, by Robin Parry, which was originally published under the pen name Gregory MacDonald, as a nod to George MacDonald. Shadowlands is the film about Lewis’ life and marriage to Joy. As Kat Coffin points out, there are elements of it that have been edited to fit the intended audience, so keep that in mind!Find Kat on Twitter Instagram Blog 

Episode 7: Interview with Matt Mikalatos on The Voyage of the Dawn TreaderMatt Mikalatos is the author of the Sunlit Lands fantasy trilogy, starting with The Crescent Stone. He also writes a bi-weekly column about C.S. Lewis at Tor.com. You can connect with him at www.mikalatos.com.Matt writes about a wide variety of Narnia-related content for Tor. Here is a link to his piece on Eustace and spiritual formation. Matt describes The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a travelogue or spiritual pilgrimage novel. Books which influenced Lewis in this genre include”The journeys of at BenedictThe Travels of Sir John MandevilleDante’s ParadisoWhat is the deal with Eustace? Matt says that Lewis was saying that intense secularism is the main problem for Eustace--he doesn’t read the write books, believe in magic, or even know what a dragon is!Matt mentions the Jewish ritual bath called Mikvah. For more information on that, go here. Matt mentions Mark Charles and his numerous books and talks on white supremacy. We are big fans of Mark Charles, go check him out!You can find Matt Mikalatos on Twitter and Facebook and if you are interested in his books (which you should be by now!) go check out The Sunlit Lands. 

In the introduction, DL mentions reading the book Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus by Reggie Williams. We highly recommend it (Go listen to this podcast episode if you want a taste of the book). Emily Metcalf is a scholar and artist who focuses on Tolkein and Lewis in both areas. You can find her website with links to her shop here (we highly recommend checking out her Tolkien inspired watercolors!). In today’s interview, she discusses with DL a recent paper she wrote on Lewis’ view of patriotism. C.S. Lewis wrote often about the four loves. Go here if you want to learn more about them. Emily describes the various forms of patriotism as understood by Lewis, from what he considers a “normal” love of country all the way to toxic nationalism. In her paper, Emily describes Lewis’s understanding of the five degrees of patriotism as: “love of home, veneration of national/cultural history, assumption of superiority, rights to power, and finally, self destruction.”Just in case you can’t remember the plot of Prince Caspian, use this as a refresher. One of the twitter handles mentioned is Diverse Tolkien. Go check it out! You can find Emily Metcalf (Emily Austin is her artist name) on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Follow The Prophetic Imagination Station podcast on Twitter or Instagram, or join the fun over at Patreon!