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The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion.
The more I read the Christian public intellectuals from the middle of the twentieth century, the more I believe in their almost prophetic vision: writing sixty or seventy years ago, thinkers like Jacques Maritain, W.H. Auden, and Reinhold Niebuhr really seem to have predicted the world we live in—and perhaps they can also help us figure out a way around the problems that threaten us in the second decade of the 21st century.
Foremost among mid-century public intellectuals in many people’s minds are the so-called Inklings: Hugo Dyson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and, of course, C.S. Lewis. But Lewis’s star shines so brightly that it sometimes blinds us to the other thinkers around him—and perhaps no one as much as Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the very few women associated with the Inklings. Despite her being a major scholar, writer, and translator in her own day, Sayers is mostly known today for her series of mystery novels and stories starring Lord Peter Wimsey. Our guest today would like to change that. Carole Vanderhoof’s new book is an edited collection of Sayers’s work called The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers.
In reading “The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers” I find myself marveling at her insights which seem often to hit the nail on the head in our contemporary world, exposing shallowness, bias, triteness and more. I stamp my feet in frustration and then remember that at 81, I should not respond so violently. The book is worth reading, especially if one is not able to read all her works.