The lion king

I commend to you all this excellent New Yorker profile of C.S. Lewis by Adam Gopnik. Gopnik is particularly strong on the tensions between Lewis' dutiful Anglicanism and his unruly imagination. My favorite passage analyzes the problem of Aslan in the Narnia books:

"If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible — a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation — now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth."