I’ve received an e-mail from a high school principal asking my advice on whether R. H. Benson’s Lord of the World would be suitable reading for his senior honors classes as a theology text. Here’s my response:

I love Lord of the World but I have mixed feelings about whether it should be a set text for high school students. It’s very dark and could be misread as being defeatist, in the sense that the secular/demonic forces appear to emerge victorious and are only defeated offstage, i.e. after the novel’s end, by a deus ex machina, i.e. the Apocalypse. I know that you would prevent a misreading but I’m still concerned that spiritually and emotionally immature teenagers could see the book as suggestive of the world’s omnipotence and the Church’s impotence. A more theologically uplifting work of fiction, me judice, would be Chesterton’s Ball and the Cross.