7 Great Christian Authors (Who Aren’t C.S. Lewis)

Dorothy L. Sayers

The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries remain popular to this day, having been adapted into television series as well as movies, but Dorothy L. Sayers was far more than a fun detective writer. The devout Christian humanist translated Dante Alighieri’s famed Divine Comedy from the Italian with a special attention to the terza rima rhyme scheme that most translators ignore or let go. Her expansive footnotes at the end of each canto on the theology of man’s journey to Heaven in the allegorical epic has kept her Hell in popular print for over 60 years. Her love for mankind led her to advocate for women’s education and pick apart the morality of advertising within her fiction works, and advocated classic Christian theology in Creed or Chaos?.

J.R.R. Tolkien

We just couldn’t get away with leaving out the father of high fantasy and master of languages. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a professor of English and linguistic scholar at the same time as his good friend “Jack,” an atheist with a vivid imagination and love for writing. (We know “Jack” better as C.S. Lewis.) After World War I, seeing the rise of the modernist philosophy and artistic movement, Tolkien lamented the lack of a shared cultural tradition and myth that might guide his country’s narrative and so set out to write a myth for modern England that would become The Lord of the Rings – with all the Christ imagery of Gandalf, corrupting influence of evil on all things, and great forgiveness. Believing that love and forgiveness should characterize human relationships, Tolkien was critical of Nazi Germany as well as the Allies use of “total war” tactics that harmed civilians.