They Called Us All Rebels: Into the Real Live Library

 

Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms (2014), by Holly Ordway.

“Ordway, an atheist academic, was convinced that faith was superstitious nonsense. As a well-educated college English professor, she saw no need for just-so stories about God. Secure in her fortress of atheism, she was safe (or so she thought) from any assault by irrational faith.

“But then something happened . . . How did she come to “lay down her arms” in surrender to Christ – and then, a few years later, enter into the Catholic Church?

“This is the moving account of her unusual journey. It is the story of an academic becoming convinced of the truth of Christianity on rational grounds – but also the account of God’s grace acting in and through her imagination.” – Amazon.

I have been interested in this book since I saw it come out in the Ignatius Press catalog years ago. After I saw the fine job she did with Tolkien’s Modern Reading, I thought it was finally time to pop on the purchase. And I was not disappointed.

Following Ordway’s journey from a secular childhood (the family celebrated Christmas, but only culturally) until her early thirties, when she began to investigate the claims of Christianity, I found once again that the works of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis (and many other examples in literature) had smuggled the proto-evangelion into her heart, ‘past watchful dragons’. As Lewis once affirmed, ”[One] who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” As she studies more, she discovers that atheists and Christians are ‘divided by a common language’, confused by the different meanings they attribute to terms like ‘God’ and ‘sin’, talking at cross-purposes, and often only for victory. She moves “from unbelief, to Evangelicalism, and finally home to the Catholic Church.” Her journey is motivated both by imagination and reason; I found her tale moving and encouraging, and on my shelves, she has found a niche that is ‘Inklings adjacent’.

About the Author: Dr. Holly Ordway is Fellow of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute, and Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith, and Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms, and has contributed chapters to volumes such as C.S. Lewis at Poets' Corner, The Inklings and King Arthur, The Story of the Cosmos, and Pivotal Players. She is also a subject editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies, and a published poet. Her newest book is Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (Word on Fire Academic, 2021). – Amazon.

“Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.” –C. S. Lewis.