Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine Book

An intelligent and incisive set of essays from one of the great minds of the 20th century. As the subtitle for this edition says, this volume is a passionate argument for the continuing relevance of Christian doctrine and, as such, is just as important now as it was 50 years ago. I particularly appreciated Sayers' thoughts on vocation and her critique of late capitalism, and find C.S. Lewis's praise of his own late wife to be the best way to describe Sayers: "[she] was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword." It is both a pleasure and a challenge to read thoughts from a mind so keen.

eta: The final essay, "Problem Picture," contains an especially fine examination of the limitations of the detective genre (taking Gaudy Night as its test case). It really made clear to me why the later Wimsey mysteries had such a powerful and profound effect on me; Sayers was interested not primarily in "whodunnit" but rather "whydunnit" -- the souls of the detective and the murderer were far more interesting to her than the crimes or the solutions themselves.