What if the deepest ache of the human heart is not a problem to be solved, but a clue pointing beyond this world?

Few writers have articulated this idea as powerfully as C. S. Lewis. From Surprised by Joy to The Weight of Glory, Lewis repeatedly returns to a strange, haunting experience of longing, a desire for something just out of reach, intensely beautiful, and impossible to satisfy by anything in ordinary life. He famously called it joy, but borrowed a German word to describe it more precisely: Sehnsucht.

In a recent episode of The C. S. Lewis Podcast, Ruth Jackson is joined by Oxford graduate Charlie Reeder, whose research uncovers how this theme of longing appears not only in Lewis’s Christian writings, but strikingly in his earliest, pre-Christian work… (Register to read the rest of the article)