Good article. It makes some strong connections between today's world and the Last Battle. When I first read the Narnia series, LB and SC were my least favorite, but as I get older, they seems sadly more relevant to my life, and I have come to appreciate them a lot more. Turn on a politician's speech, and all too often you hear Shift's voice. Listen to the applause that greets dreadful lies and you'll hear Puzzle's baffled bleating.
I only wish that there wasn't the dismissive reference to college students and to professors. I think there is a tendency to assume that all people on college campuses are liberal, but that really isn't fair. Plenty of us are conservatives or not affiliated with any party or just don't care about politics at all. We aren't hippies like our parents, and we aren't actually that radical. We're more likely to organize a food drive or participate in Relay for Life than to participate in some elaborate protest movement. It does no good to just label us as the enemy and decide we won't listen before you even try to engage us in conversation. The fact is: if the author wants to see a change in the future, he is going to have to engage us in conversation. He is going to have to work with us or try to convince us to see his point of view. The churches where I went to college made a real effort to reach out to students on campus, and it made a big difference to a lot of kids, including me. We can give a lot of energy and time to churches if they don't write us off as a waste of time.
Intellectual does not automatically equal liberal. I think that the conservative movement sometimes slits its own throat with open-minded, swing voters by implying that it does. I understand that the left tries to paint the debate in those terms, but I wish that the right wouldn't fall into that rhetoric, too. It makes an intellectual conservative feel a bit out of place...
