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She wrote in terms that were at once uncompromising, learned, and humorous. Concerning the problem of evil, one of the thorniest theological dilemmas, for example, she refused to get swallowed up in vague abstractions:

"'Why doesn't God smite this dictator dead?' is a question a little remote from us," says one of the characters in The Man Born to Be King. "Why, madam, did he not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did he not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?"

Though she ardently defended the church, she was not blind to its shortcomings nor afraid to poke fun at it when it became merely moralistic or institutional: "The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter," she wrote in Creed or Chaos?, "is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables."

"Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something," she once wrote, and all her life she was driven to create. At age 51, she picked up Dante's Divine Comedy for the first time, and she became mesmerized: "I bolted my meals, neglected my sleep, work, and correspondence, drove my friends crazy …," she wrote "until I had panted my way through the Three Realms of the Dead from top to bottom and from bottom to top."

What she discovered, she said, was that Dante "was not grim and austere, but sweet and companionable … an affable archangel … [and] that he was a very great comic writer—which is quite the last thing one would ever have inferred from the things people say in their books."

She decided that one of her last efforts would be a fresh translation of Dante to help more readers delight in his great work. Her translation was immediately criticized by scholars who felt Sayers was dabbling in areas beyond her expertise, but the translation remains in print and is, according to one 1992 biography, "the most influential and popular translation on the market."

In her lifetime, she counted among her friends T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams, and C.S. Lewis, and after her death, she still holds the devotion of millions of mystery fans, as well as Christians who want the faith explained with energy, reason, and a twinkle in the eye.

Recommended Resources Buy the book containing this and many other profiles of Christians you should know.

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