Erin Newcomb writing at Patheos encourages fiction as a route to truth and faith:
In his text Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, C. S. Lewis writes of fairy stories that “it would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what.” It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods (29) because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a “special kind of longing” (30). Fiction, Lewis asserted, often triggered an “inconsolable longing,” (from the German word “sehnsucht”), a deep and heartfelt yearning for some truth, some beauty, some recollection of home just out of our reach. It comes as no surprise that in Lewis’s own works of fiction, then, his characters were always stumbling through magical wardrobes and paintings and puddles, and, upon their re-entrance into this world, were forever changed and craving a return. Fiction, at its best, can illustrate what is possible by showing us what is beautiful.
…..I watch my elder daughter grow in her love of stories; some days she is Little Red Riding Hood. Today she insisted that we call her Dorothy, and her baby sister got to play Scarecrow. We are working through The Wizard of Oz for the second time now, and she is practicing her courage, and cleverness, and love at home, because really, there’s no other place like it.