C.S. Lewis began his academic career at Oxford University as an atheist. He was attracted to faith in Christ through the writings of many such as George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, George Herbert, John Donne, Phillip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and John Milton. He noticed that these writers were Christian and that they wrote of the Roughness and Density of Life. Lewis was attracted to their honest portrayal of life as we seem to really live it day to day, with all of its complexities. Christian academics would do well to draw inspiration from Lewis’s observations at this point in order to write and lecture in a way that is unpretentious and authentic.