Beyond Selidor

and, dare I say it, during a particular era in which most people who studied at university were very comfortably well off and didn't seem to have huge fears about student loans or future career prospects and seemed to treat college life as a blissful period of self-discovery, friendship-building, and intellectual development without any thought of the future — like a space that existed outside time

EXACTLY!!! The platonic ideal of the undergrad experience that literally no one has had for decades but that still lives wistfully in my head!

I've always struggled with CS Lewis (and his whole everything with women is a large part of why).

This is fair! TWHF was written for his wife, after she'd already started to have a (quite profound) influence on him and I think it really shows. I would be very interested in your thoughts on it! I reread it a couple of years ago and I thought it still held up and was, in fact, doing even more interesting things than I thought that it was doing when I read it as an evangelical teen. Whatever else he was (and he was some negative things!) Lewis was NOT an American evangelical, which is probably why this book is one of the things (like high church music or Buechner or whatever) that I've still been able to hold onto despite moving into a Jewish space.