Tag: C. S. Lewis

The Four Loves: Affection

The Four Loves by CS Lewis

Some of us are reading through C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves this summer for the Chi Alpha Summer Reading Project. Every other week I’ll post some reflections on the readings. 

I have written about this chapter once before, back in 2018. My remarks here are fresh (although the opening section is very similar). 

YouTube has something amazing in relation to this week’s reading: a 1957 recording of C. S. Lewis himself giving the lecture upon which this chapter is based. I’ve embedded the video, and you can read the transcript as well. You should at least listen to a few minutes if you’ve never heard the voice of Lewis before.

The channel hosting this video is worth checking out. It’s called CSLewisDoodle and it “doodles selected essays by C.S. Lewis in order to make them easier to understand.” It’s got doodled treatments of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and more. Consider subscribing to it.

On to affection. Lewis is discussing the type of love described by the Greek word storge (στοργή), a love which we describe using the words affection or fondness. 

The word storge does not appear directly in the New Testament, although it does appear as a root of other words. In both Romans 1:31 and 2nd Timothy 3:3 the word astorgos (ἄστοργος) is rendered by various translations as “heartless” or “unloving” or “without natural affection.” And in Romans 12:10 we find the word philostorgos (φιλόστοργος) which means “devoted”.

I provide this linguistic data merely by way of background. It doesn’t affect Lewis’ discussion of affection except to explain why he’s not quoting a bunch of Bible verses.

There is one section in this chapter that always strikes me:

If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved—their manifest sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity—produce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty. If ever, at some favoured moment, any germ of Affection for them stirs in us, their demand for more and still more petrifies us again.

What an arresting phrase: “they seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty.”

I once had a cat who became so obese that he could no longer lick himself clean. And so for a season he stank. Wherever he went, the smell of an outhouse followed him. And yet he was desperate for affection. He would approach people to receive pats and his stench would drive them away. 

And here is where the story becomes fascinating: in his sadness he developed the habit of sleeping in his litter box. I was amazed: the poor creature had found a way to make his stench even worse. His habits made his desires unattainable.

I am pleased to report that eventually his behavior changed, he lost weight, his stench decreased, and he received affection. He became much happier. 

I have met people who do the equivalent of sleeping in their litter box. They live odious lives. In the most extreme cases they undermine their friendships and are baffled that they find themselves alone. In the passage excerpted above Lewis talks about people who are so needy it is repellent, and that is one way we can carry a stench around with us but it is hardly the only one. There are many milder cases. Consider a young woman who is unwilling to be vulnerable beyond a certain point and is surprised that her friendships lack depth. Or consider a young man unwilling to risk rejection who is then disappointed that his friendships never blossom into romance. Or picture someone who comes late to church and leaves early and is frustrated that they lack community. In each case, they “seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty.”

Take a moment to evaluate your relationships. Is there an absence of affection or camaraderie which frustrates you? It may simply be that you haven’t found your people yet (and Lewis will talk more about friendship in the next chapter). But it is also possible that you are doing the equivalent of sleeping in your litter box.

If you are frustrated that you are not experiencing the affection you desire, spend some time in prayerful contemplation and ask God to reveal any self-limiting habits you have developed and to guide you into better habits. Your now is not your forever — my cat changed and so can we.

And if you haven’t already, read the “affection” chapter in The Four Loves and watch the Lewis doodle video above — they may provide you with some insight.

Thoughts on This Fourth of July

The Four Loves by CS Lewis

Some of us are reading through C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves this summer for the Chi Alpha Summer Reading Project. Every other week I’ll post some reflections on the readings. 

When I laid out the reading schedule for The Four Loves, I didn’t realize that we would read Lewis’ remarks on patriotism on the fourth of July. How delightful!

I’ve actually written about this chapter of The Four Loves before, so I’ll take a slightly different direction today.

Lewis celebrates the love of country as one of the most basic of loves. He points out that the love of your nation is an indispensable part of loving all of humanity.

As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness.… those who do not love the fellow-villagers or the fellow-townsmen whom they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving ‘Man’ whom they have not.

This worries some people, because doesn’t loving your country lead to a dislike of others? Not at all! One of the virtues of healthy patriotism is that it allows you to love and respect people from other nations.

[This kind of patriotism] becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude towards foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realised that the Frenchmen like cafe complet just as we like bacon and eggs—why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.

By contrast, a disdain for your own nation will lead to disdain for others. Part of celebrating diversity is realizing that you contribute to it. Your culture can enrich a foreigner just as much as their culture can enrich you, and so to deny them by pretending there is nothing good about your culture is cruel.

This doesn’t mean that you need to ignore the flaws of your nation. Lewis devotes several pages in this chapter to helping people sort through the fact that “the actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful things.” Much of what he says reminds me of the way G.K. Chesterton talked about patriotism in Orthodoxy chapter 5, “The Flag of This World.” Chesterton’s point is that patriots see the flaws of their nation and grieve them. It is because people love their nation that they want to fix it. 

The following from the aforementioned Chesterton chapter is one of my favorite quotes of all time — I beg you to read through it slowly.

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing—say Pimlico [Glen’s note: Pimlico is part of London]. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

When a lot of us truly, sincerely, and earnestly love America over time, our love (and the efforts that spring from it) will transform America. That’s what has happened in the past, and God willing it will continue into the future. 

Lewis writes about more than patriotism in this chapter, and I commend the rest of it to you. But today is the Fourth of July, and love of nation seemed like the right theme to focus on. So from me, from C.S. Lewis, and from G.K. Chesterton: happy Independence Day!

The Four Loves: Introduction

The Four Loves by CS Lewis

Some of us are reading through C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves this summer for the Chi Alpha Summer Reading Project. Every other week I’ll post some reflections on the readings. 

Today we complete our first reading, the ten pages of chapter 1.

What stood out to me is something that probably seemed like a throwaway observation back in 1960.

I was looking forward to writing some fairly easy panegyrics on the first sort of love and disparagements of the second. And much of what I was going to say still seems to me to be true…. Every time I have tried to think the thing out along those lines I have ended in puzzles and contradictions. The reality is more complicated than I supposed.

Lewis knew what he intended to write, but trying to work it out clearly enough to put it on paper showed him that his thinking was fuzzy. Contradictory, even. Putting feelings, impressions, and assumptions into words is clarifying.

generative AI has entered the chat

ChatGPT and its competitors are tools and they have a place, but please don’t let them undermine your ability to write out a clear argument. Writing what you think is one of the only ways to force yourself to grapple with what you think. Talking it out can also help, but it’s not as brutal as writing. The flow of conversation can allow you to gloss over a weak point in your argument, but having to write out each of your assumptions and inferences on paper doesn’t provide such wiggle room.

I think most of you know that I write my sermons out word-for-word and then try to deliver the sermon without consulting my notes. Why do I write my sermons out if I don’t intend to read the resulting manuscript? It’s for precisely the reasons I mentioned above: to write it out means that any weak spots in my thinking become clear. I still make mistakes in both interpretation and argumentation, but I avoid a lot of obvious mistakes that would otherwise crop up. Delivering the sermon without the notes is about better connecting with the audience. If my thinking on the subject is sufficiently clear, I don’t need the notes except for when I’m quoting a passage from the Bible or some other source.

How does generative AI play into this? I don’t use AI to write my sermons because the goal isn’t a well-written sermon, the goal is a thought-through sermon. And specifically, a thought-through-by-me sermon. A well-written sermon is mostly the byproduct of preparing a well-thought-through sermon. And so if I were to use a tool like chatGPT to write a sermon for me, I would be an actor, not a preacher. Actors need scripts. Preachers need convictions. I need to know (and I need you to know) that I believe what I preach, and I can only know I believe it fully if I write it myself.

Even if I became confident that a ChatGPT sermon would be better than mine and you would enjoy it more, that wouldn’t sway me. Preaching that way would enfeeble me, perhaps even corrupt me. To be a preacher means many things, but among them is the claim that I really mean it. Not just that I mean the things I say in that specific sermon. I have to mean the whole Christianity thing. To be a preacher is to claim that I’m doing my best to follow Jesus. Even if I never preached a sermon against slander, if I had a habit of posting slanderous things on social media you would nonetheless judge me a hypocrite and someone who should be kept away from the pulpit. To stand in the pulpit is to stand before God and man and say, “I really mean it and I’m trying.” Part of that “really meaning it” is manifest in the way I prepare sermons.

This isn’t a new thing. Even before tools like chatGPT came along every preacher had the option of plagiarizing other preachers’ sermons. It has always been looked down upon, partly for its dishonesty (one of the implicit claim of a sermon is “this is what I came up with”) and partly because it meant the preacher wasn’t growing — the act of crafting a sermon makes you a better Christian (or forces you to embrace hypocrisy) and a clearer thinker.

This is not an anti-AI rant. I will sometimes use generative AI after I’ve written my sermon. I will give it prompts like “Here is the manuscript of a sermon I intend to preach to a group of Stanford students. What’s the biggest blind spot in this sermon?” or “What’s the most devastating critique you can make of it?” or “Is there anyone this might needlessly offend?” And then I’ll take that feedback and use it to refine the sermon. Using AI like this is fine because it forces me to strengthen my thinking and wrestle with my convictions. At times the AI has suggested that I should take out a potentially offensive claim or tone down some rhetoric and I’ve thought, “Nah — this is what people need to hear and this is how they need to hear it.” Other times I consider the feedback and say, “Huh — I hadn’t thought about it that way. Yeah, let me reword that so that I’m making the point I intend to make and not being distractingly offensive.”

Obviously, none of you are preachers (at least, none of you has that as a key part of your job). But there is probably some area of your life where you need to be able to think clearly and to know that you have thought clearly. Don’t allow the wonderful tool of generative AI to keep you from developing that skill. If you’d like to mull that over, I recommend the wonderful and very short story The Whispering Earring.

Lewis, of course, had no idea that such a thing as generative AI would ever be invented. He just mentioned that his thinking about love was unclear until he tried to write about it. One of the beauties of reading a well-thought-through book is that it continues to have relevance decades after it was written and that its insights are relevant to new domains that did not exist when its arguments were crafted.

If you’re not reading The Four Loves with us, I highly recommend it. You can download a free copy at archive.org.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 497: Christianity in Space, Redeeming Turkish Delight, and How To Sneeze

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stranded Astronaut Held Onto Faith in Darkest Moments: ‘God Was There’ (Sylvia St. Cyr, The Roys Report): “After being stranded for nine months in space, veteran NASA astronaut Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore is sharing how his faith in God kept him going.… Wilmore, a member and elder of Providence Baptist Church in Pasadena, Texas, stayed connected with his church throughout his time in space. He even made a few calls to some elderly church members throughout his time stranded on the station, to encourage them.”
  2. What Follows from Lab Leak? (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “First, and most importantly, the higher the probability that SARS-CoV‑2 leaked from a lab the higher the probability we should expect another pandemic. Research at Wuhan was not especially unusual or high-tech. Modifying viruses such as coronaviruses (e.g., inserting spike proteins, adapting receptor-binding domains) is common practice in virology research and gain-of-function experiments with viruses have been widely conducted. Thus, manufacturing a virus capable of killing ~20 million human beings or more is well within the capability of say ~500‑1000 labs worldwide. The number of such labs is growing in number and such research is becoming less costly and easier to conduct. Thus, lab-leak means the risks are larger than we thought and increasing.” 
    • Some very practical suggestions in this short piece.
  3. The Hidden Hands: Amanuenses and the Letters Behind the Letters (C. Michael Patton, Credo House): “Yes, the secretaries could write competent Greek. But often, due to the personal additions at the end of these letters, I was able to compare the handwriting and style of the author himself. And get this: in many cases, the author’s own Greek was better than the scribe’s. More refined. More fluid. More legible. This shattered my assumptions. It meant that we can’t assume that people used secretaries only because they were illiterate, uneducated, or of low status. On the contrary, people who were clearly capable writers—sometimes better writers—still made use of amanuenses.” 
    • This is a fascinating look at the way ancient letters were written with the help of assistants — including letters in the New Testament.
    • Vaguely related (in the sense that it’s about the historical background for Bible stuff): Did Jesus teach in Greek? (Ian Paul, blog): “The argument about Jesus and Greek has several layers, starting with the most general. Were the regions Jesus taught in multilingual (polyglot), and how do we know? Is it likely that Jesus himself was multilingual? And is there specific evidence of this in the New Testament, in examples of his teaching?”
  4. Why Christian Men Need Friendship, Not Just “Accountability” (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Accountability is a fruit from a much larger tree. In an age in which millions of American men are so lonely it’s literally killing them, the urgent issue is not finding someone to receive a report of your web activity. It’s finding someone who’ll talk to you at all. Why? Because friendship has a sanctifying power. Not only is it easier to be honest and transparent with someone whom you’re convinced is a true friend, but the friendship itself is a means of grace in the fight against lust.”
  5. The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic): “I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.” 
    • A wild story. Lots of follow-up in the news. Just google for it.
    • Seven Ways of Looking at a Group Chat (Nick Cattogio, The Dispatch): “There are three distinct scandals here and different culprits in each one. The first is using Signal instead of secure government channels to discuss something as sensitive as military strikes. Everyone involved, save Jeffrey Goldberg, bears responsibility for that. The second is mistakenly including Goldberg in the discussion, for which Waltz would seem to be at fault. And the third is going so far as to share ‘operational details’ in the chat, potentially placing people in the field at risk, which sure sounds like reckless mishandling of classified information—a subject on which Republicans have had a lot to say in recent years. The blame for that would appear to land on Hegseth.”
    • Investigation Reveals DOGE Had Just Laid Off The Guy Whose Job It Was To Make Sure Jeffrey Goldberg Wasn’t In The War Group Chat (Babylon Bee)
  6. The Inklings:
    • Why JRR Tolkien Made March 25 the Day the Ring Was Destroyed (Joseph Pearce, National Catholic Register): “Frodo Baggins, as the one chosen to be the Ring bearer, is the Cross bearer. He is, therefore, a Christ figure. This is why Tolkien has him leaving Rivendell on Dec. 25 and arriving at Mount Doom (Golgotha) on March 25 (Good Friday). Frodo’s journey, or pilgrimage, begins on Christ’s birthday and ends on the date of Christ’s death.”
    • In Search of Turkish Delight (Valerie Stivers, First Things): “Işin quotes American Naval physician James McKay, writing in 1830: Turkish delight was ‘a delicious pasty-mass which melts away in the mouth, and leaves a fragrant flavor behind.’ The French artist and writer Pretextat Lecomte described it as ‘beautiful’ in color and ‘warm and transparent.’ To make it, Turkish confectioners used hand-sifted wheat starch (produced by a domestic process with a long local tradition), and employed a laborious technique that called for several hours of continuous stirring. They used musk and rose water as flavorings, and also sprinkled musk on the powdered sugar coating. They rubbed the trays used to mold it and the scissors used to cut it with fragrant almond oil. By the 1880s, Işin says, the flavors had multiplied to include clotted cream, mastic, almond, and pistachio. In the 1900s came pine nut and hazelnut, and flavors from essences or syrups such as violet, lemon, and bitter orange. This starts to sound like a dessert a child could dream of, or that an open-minded and pleasure-loving adult like C. S. Lewis would find tempting. It seems likely that very few modern eaters have ever tasted true Turkish delight, at least outside the Grand Bazaar. All contemporary recipes use corn starch. Musk oil is illegal.” 
      • I am both personally disappointed that I can’t taste it and thrilled that Lewis wasn’t crazy.
  7. How worried should legal immigrants be about Trump’s deportations? (Nicole Narea, Vox): “These are uncertain times for many immigrants in the US. There have been reports of individual visa and green card holders and tourists who have been detained and deported. However, the Trump administration does not seem to be indiscriminately targeting legal immigrants who have authorization to be in the US on a large scale. Some have reportedly been targeted based on their political activism.…  And it’s not just immigrants who have been affected. A US citizen said he was walking down the streets of Chicago when he was arrested by immigration agents, who confiscated his ID and held him for 10 hours before releasing him. Even though limited in number, these cases have been going viral — and are understandably causing fear in immigrant communities.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar produced shrewd warriors “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a similar way, we need to become wise people whose faith interacts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may continue the tradition of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a partisan organization. To paraphrase another minister: we are not about the donkey’s agenda and we are not about the elephant’s agenda — we are about the Lamb’s agenda. Having said that, I read widely (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ideological Turing test and in part because I do not believe I can fairly say “I agree” or “I disagree” until I can say “I understand”) and may at times share articles that have a strong partisan bias simply because I find the article stimulating. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with everything an author says in an article I mention, much less things the author has said in other articles (although if I strongly disagree with something in the article I’ll usually mention it). And to the extent you can discern my opinions, please understand that they are my own and not necessarily those of Chi Alpha or any other organization I may be perceived to represent. Also, remember that I’m not reporting news — I’m giving you a selection of things I found interesting. There’s a lot happening in the world that’s not making an appearance here because I haven’t found stimulating articles written about it. If this was forwarded to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 472



On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

This is volume 472. There are (I am told) 472 ways to tile a 5x5 grid with integer-sized squares (1x1 squares mixed with 2x2 squares and 3x3 squares, etc).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. “We Lost Our Baby”: North Carolina Family Loses 3 after Climbing to Roof to Escape Helene Floods (FOX Weather on YouTube, 11 minutes long): “I want them to remember that there is joy beyond the pain… My son couldn’t be more proud at me for hanging on; my parents were probably lifting me up when I was between the two things that were holding me down. They are rejoicing at the fact that I now can tell them what God did for me, because it was God. He said, ‘Be still. I am in control, and you will pass on.’ This is a backfire for the devil, because he tried to take me out, and her I am sharing the word that my seven-year-old is a hero, and my parents live on in God’s glory.” 
    • You will absolutely cry watching this. Recommended by a student.
  2. How Tolkien and Lewis Re-enchanted a War-Weary World (Lev Grossman, New York Times): “‘The Mythmakers’ takes us through 20 years of deep intellectual friendship between Lewis and Tolkien — which widened to include the social circle around them, known as the Inklings — but it’s just as interesting when documenting the slow, regrettable shipwreck of that friendship. Jack and Tollers turned out to be not so very, very like each other after all. After his conversion, Lewis, loud as ever, became famous as a radio lecturer on Christianity; this irked the quiet, rigorous Tolkien, because Lewis had never formally studied theology, and Tolkien would never have lectured on anything without earning six advanced degrees in it first.” 
  3. What Would Lecrae Do? (Christina Gonzalez Ho, Christianity Today): “…to hear one of the most talented and decorated rappers alive name-check an artist whose work has revolved around Jesus was deeply heartening. What moves me is not the idea that someday my own work might be noticed by someone more famous. It’s the thought that a sincere, intelligent, and profound artist like Kendrick Lamar, someone who’s seen no end of good ideas and interesting art, might find something in straightforwardly Christian music that gives him pause, that makes him reconsider.” 
    • Christina is one of our alumni: a former worship leader and officer in our ministry.
  4. Held Hostage Overseas? The IRS Wants Your Back Taxes. (Emma Camp, Reason): “Many Americans who return home after being illegally detained overseas arrive to find they’ve been billed thousands of dollars by the IRS—including late fees for unpaid taxes.… ‘I got one of those bills from the IRS saying, you owe this much on this year, you owe this much on this year because of failure to pay on time—here’s the interest that’s accrued,’ Washington Post reporter and former hostage Jason Rezaian told NPR. He faced more than $6,000 in fees for unpaid taxes after his release, following 544 days of detention in Iran.”
  5. Become Slaves to One Another (John M. G. Barclay, Plough): “Paul understands the world not as an empty space in which individuals carve out their private sphere of freedom, but as a terrain already populated by competing powers greater than human actors, who only imagine that they are free. As far as Paul is concerned, our search for an individuated, atomized autonomy is itself an enslaving delusion, because we are, and are meant to be, free only as we are formed by relationships with God and with others.” 
    • The author is a professor of early Christianity at the Durham University in England. He’s a well-regarded Biblical scholar.
  6. I Spent 13 Years Living as a Man. But After My Spouse’s Exposé, I’m Detransitioning. (Tiger Reed, The Free Press): “For detransitioners, there is no clear path. Gender-affirming clinicians have been ignoring and dismissing our concerns. While my transition was covered by insurance, my detransition is not. To restore my hairline and remove my body hair will cost me thousands. In the next few years I may have breast reconstructive surgery. There are many questions I don’t have the answers to—such as whether my kids, now ranging in age from two to 16 years old, should still call me ‘Dad.’ I am planning to change my name back to Roxxanne, and to change my license so it says ‘female’ again. But I wonder if I’ll ever pass as a woman.  The gender-affirming care model relies on vulnerable people’s impatience—rushing them toward major medical changes rather than stopping to understand the root of their pain and suffering.”
  7. As America’s Marijuana Use Grows, So Do the Harms (Megan Twohey, Danielle Ivory and Carson Kessler, New York Times): “The accumulating harm is broader and more severe than previously reported. And gaps in state regulations, limited public health messaging and federal restraints on research have left many consumers, government officials and even medical practitioners in the dark about such outcomes.… as more people turn to marijuana for help with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues, few know that it can cause temporary psychosis and is increasingly associated with the development of chronic psychotic disorders.” 
    • This is sad, both because of the human suffering involved and also because some people seem genuinely shocked that drugs can have negative side-effects. 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar produced shrewd warriors “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a similar way, we need to become wise people whose faith interacts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may continue the tradition of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a partisan organization. To paraphrase another minister: we are not about the donkey’s agenda and we are not about the elephant’s agenda — we are about the Lamb’s agenda. Having said that, I read widely (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ideological Turing test and in part because I do not believe I can fairly say “I agree” or “I disagree” until I can say “I understand”) and may at times share articles that have a strong partisan bias simply because I find the article stimulating. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with everything an author says in an article I mention, much less things the author has said in other articles (although if I strongly disagree with something in the article I’ll usually mention it). And to the extent you can discern my opinions, please understand that they are my own and not necessarily those of Chi Alpha or any other organization I may be perceived to represent. Also, remember that I’m not reporting news — I’m giving you a selection of things I found interesting. There’s a lot happening in the world that’s not making an appearance here because I haven’t found stimulating articles written about it. If this was forwarded to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 454



On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

This is volume 454, a number whose symmetry pleases me.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Nones Have Hit a Ceiling (Ryan Burge, Substack): “The rise of the nones may be largely over now. At least it won’t be increasing in the same way that it did in the prior thirty years. Of course, the question is why? I don’t know if I have a bulletproof answer. I think the easiest explanation is that a lot of marginally attached people switched to ‘no religion’ on surveys over the last decade or two. Eventually, there weren’t that many marginally attached folks anymore. All you had left were the very committed religious people who likely won’t become nones for any reason. The loose top soil has been scooped off and hauled away, leaving nothing but hard bedrock underneath.” 
    • Emphasis removed for readability.
  2. ‘Loud-mouthed bully’: CS Lewis satirised Oxford peer in secret poems (Dalya Alberge, The Guardian): “Joking that an infuriated Lewis had perhaps composed them during one of Wyld’s lectures, Horobin noted that one of them identifies Wyld through an acrostic with the initial letters spelling out the name ‘Henry Cecil Wyld’. He added: ‘On the remaining blank pages he penned a series of additional satirical verses lampooning Wyld – one in English, alongside others in Latin, Greek, French and even Old English.’ ” 
    • Even Lewis’s shade was epic and erudite. I love this story. Also, a reminder that every word will be brought into judgement — even words uttered (or penned) in secret. I should mention he would not yet have been a Christian when these poems appear to have been composed.
  3. What Do Students at Elite Colleges Really Want? (Francesca Mari, New York Times): “…everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money. Someone else told me it was common at parties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.” 
    • Unlocked
  4. Redefining the scientific method: as the use of sophisticated scientific methods that extend our mind (Alexander Krauss, PNAS Nexus): “This study reveals that 25% of all discoveries since 1900 did not apply the common scientific method (all three features)—with 6% of discoveries using no observation, 23% using no experimentation, and 17% not testing a hypothesis. Empirical evidence thus challenges the common view of the scientific method.” 
    • From the abstract because it is so succinctly put, but the article itself is easy to read. Recommended. The author is a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics.
  5. American Missionaries Killed in Port-au-Prince (Daniel Silliman, Christianity Today): “Criminal gangs killed nearly 5,000 people in Haiti last year. Then, in 2024, the gangs banded together, turned against the politicians who had once collaborated with them for power, and launched coordinated attacks on the government. The gangs set police stations on fire, shut down the main airport and seaport, and broke open two prisons, releasing an estimated 4,000 inmates. They vandalized government offices, stormed the National Palace, and took control of about 80 percent of the capital.”
  6. Group chats rule the world. (Sriram Krishnan, personal blog): “Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups.… The great culture wars of 2020 meant people, especially in tech, weren’t comfortable sharing their views in public lest they get various online mobs after them.”
  7. What ‘Tradwives’—and Some of Their Critics—Miss (Hannah Anderson, The Dispatch): “But women haven’t been uniquely lied to. Families have been lied to about what their homes can and should be. Men and women alike have been told that their greatest achievements lie outside of it. And yet, a marriage reduced from two ‘careerists’ to one is still serving corporate interests. At best, a woman sacrificing her career to enable her husband’s career (as Butker asserts his wife does and as he counseled new female graduates) misses the point. At worst, it enables the very marketplace that desires nothing more than to creep into our homes and commodify every expression of goodness and beauty that happens there—even if what we’re selling is traditionalism.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Stanford University Tour by Drone (YouTube): six minutes (it’s a little long, but the first bit is nice to watch)
  • Will 18 year old Emma Olson FOOL Penn & Teller with a Rubik’s cube? (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): nine minutes
  • When an Eel Takes a Bite Then an Octopus Might Claim an Eyeball (Joshua Rapp Learn, New York Times): “In each video, the common octopus may sacrifice arms, much as lizards drop their tails to distract predators, Dr. Hernández-Urcera said. In the first video, the octopus loses three arms while the one in the second video loses two — but they can fully regrow limbs in about 45 days, some lab tests show.” 
    • Rarely do I find that news articles are improved by embedded videos. This is one of the exceptions. Very cool.
  • Are Plants Intelligent? If So, What Does That Mean for Your Salad? (Elizabeth A. Harris, New York Times): “Obviously we’re animals that need to eat plants. There’s no way around that. But there is a way of imagining a future with agricultural practices and harvesting practices that are more tuned into the life style of the plant, the things it’s capable of and its proclivities. This opens up the world of plant ethics.” 
    • The article itself is interesting. The title made me laugh.

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar produced shrewd warriors “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a similar way, we need to become wise people whose faith interacts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may continue the tradition of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a partisan organization. To paraphrase another minister: we are not about the donkey’s agenda and we are not about the elephant’s agenda — we are about the Lamb’s agenda. Having said that, I read widely (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ideological Turing test and in part because I do not believe I can fairly say “I agree” or “I disagree” until I can say “I understand”) and may at times share articles that have a strong partisan bias simply because I find the article stimulating. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with everything an author says in an article I mention, much less things the author has said in other articles (although if I strongly disagree with something in the article I’ll usually mention it). And to the extent you can discern my opinions, please understand that they are my own and not necessarily those of Chi Alpha or any other organization I may be perceived to represent. Also, remember that I’m not reporting news — I’m giving you a selection of things I found interesting. There’s a lot happening in the world that’s not making an appearance here because I haven’t found stimulating articles written about it. If this was forwarded to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Christianity For Modern Pagans: Vanity and the Vanity of Human Justice

Pascal diagnosed our modern dysfunctions 350 years ago.

Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through an annotated translation of Pascal’s Pensees called Christianity For Modern Pagans, I’ll post the thoughts I’m emailing the students here (which will largely consist of excerpts I found insightful). They are all tagged summer-reading-project-2020. The reading schedule is online.

One reason I appreciate reading writers from the distant past is that when they make an observation relevant to modern times it is usually more powerful than if it was uttered by one of our contemporaries.

It reminds me of an excerpt from C. S. Lewis’ introduction to a translation of Athanasius’ On The Incarnation of the Word of God:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

C. S. Lewis

With that in mind, two of Pascal’s observations struck me as especially prescient:

The mind naturally believes and the will naturally loves, so that when there are no true objects for them they necessarily become attached to false ones. 

Pascal, Pensée 661 (page 77)

Hundreds of years ago, Pascal accurately diagnosed the modern American. Our deceptively secular age is full of religion, and for many people politics is their preferred form of worship. Look back over my Friday “Issachar” emails and you will see many examples of the religious dynamics in our cultural debates; in fact, the very first article I ever shared was Joseph Bottum’s The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas and this week I’m likely to share David French’s America Is in the Grips of a Fundamentalist Revival.

As your pastor I urge you: don’t participate in the crazy of whatever group you tend to vote with. You already have a religion, so you are free to treat politics as significant but not ultimate. Back in the 90’s, political scientist J. Budziszewski wrote two articles back-to-back for First Things, The Problem With Liberalism and The Problem With Conservativism. Read them both, especially read the one that describes your team. You won’t resonate with every critique in either article, but you will find much to think about.

Moving on, I also appreciated one of Pascal’s comments which is relevant to social media:

We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one.

Pascal, Pensée 806 (page 79)

Reading this Pensée brought to mind Madison Fischer’s assertion that ditching social media was key to her winning a medal as a competitive climber.

“I cared so much about what everyone thought of me that it became outsourced confidence…. I couldn’t step out of the reputation I forged online so I lived in a world of entitlement. Pride in my accomplishments made me content, and contentedness is poison to a young athlete who has to stay hungry if she wants to stay competitive.”

Madison Fischer

She realized that she faced a choice: actually become a more competitive climber or spend her time trying to look like what people thought a competitive climber should be.

In a similar manner, we can actually strive to be like Jesus or we can instead try to become what other people think a follower of Jesus should be. In other words, we can either follow Jesus or we can follow other people. We can follow Christ or a crowd. 

This is about more than social media, but it’s definitely about social media as well. You probably know that I am on Facebook and Twitter, so clearly I’m not about to tell you to delete your accounts. But I do urge you to be aware of the temptations they create. Meditate on Matthew 6:1, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

Other tidbits I appreciated:

The atheist argues: “If there were a God, how could there be injustice?” To which Pascal replies: “If there is injustice, there must be true justice for it to be relative to and a defect of; and this true justice is not found on Earth or in man, therefore it must exist in Heaven and God.” Either there or nowhere; and if nowhere, then “everything is permissible”. But not everything is permissible. Therefore there must be a God.

Kreeft commenting on Pensée 697, page 94

And I particularly like this one. It’s true of babies, and it’s true of adults. Different trifles, same psychology.

A trifle consoles us because a trifle upsets us.

Pascal, Pensée 43 (page 75)

The Screwtape Letters: Twenty-Six Through Thirty

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will largely consist of excerpts I found insightful). They are all tagged summer-reading-project-2018. The schedule is online.

We’re almost done. Next week’s readings will be very short indeed. You might even want to finish them off now — they will take you a few extra minutes at most.

These passages caught my eye this week:

In letter 27, the demon says of humans

…their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events. Why that creative act leaves room for their free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy’s nonsense about “Love”. How it does so is no problem at all; for the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it. (Letter 27, pages 264–265)

I like this, but I’m not sure I agree with it completely. The last half I’m definitely on board with. The first half makes me hesitant. God rested on the seventh day, but Lewis makes the demon say that all of human history is the continuation of the act of creation. There’s a beautiful insight hidden in there, but I think the way Lewis worded it falls outside the bounds that Scripture permits. I’d be more comfortable with something along these lines, “Of course they can find an unbroken series of causes leading up to the condition they desired — the Enemy saw their request being made simultaneously with His answer to their prayer manifesting two weeks later even as He began forming the conditions that would lead to its answer a month before they even became aware of their need. There is a sense in which it is all Now to Him.”

Now that I’ve offered some writing advice to Lewis, I’m off to give some investing advice to Warren Buffet. But first, the next missive (letter 28).

Lewis has Screwtape offer a complaint about humans and time.

How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy allows us so little of it. The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth. It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a “normal life” is the exception. Apparently He wants some—but only a very few—of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the better we must use it. (Letter 28, page 268)

Clearly, Lewis believes that infants and children go to heaven. I share this belief. As David said of his dead son in 2 Samuel 2:23, “I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”

Elsewhere in the letter we see that this ticket to heaven for the young is so frustrating to demons that they sometimes endeavor to keep us alive, but I think that’s not quite right. After all, John 10:10 informs us that the enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy. Nonetheless, Lewis is on to something here.

This last excerpt (from letter 29) is my favorite for the week.

This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky. (Letter 29, page 270)

This, this, a thousand times this. Act with courage. It takes courage to stand for Christ at Stanford. It takes courage to forgo a pleasure and risk giving offense because of a deep conviction. It takes courage to tell your friends certain truths.

Something that encourages me (literally encourages me — puts courage into me) is to reflect on this: Revelation 21:8 tells us that the cowardly are the first group thrown into hell. It’s a sobering thought.

And this related point at the end of the letter speaks directly to what I see as one of the chief failings in modern culture:

For remember, the act of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin and, though we enjoy it, does us no good. (Letter 29, page 271)

So many people today confuse feelings with action. For instance, they often seem to believe that feeling bad about something is the same thing as opposing it. “I saw those pictures of starving children and I felt bad. I should tweet about how horrible hunger is.” Do you know who is actually opposed to hunger? The people who send money or spend time to combat hunger.  On the last day, Jesus is not going to say, “As you felt it for the least of these, so you felt it for me.” Allow your feelings to inform your choices, but do not confuse the two.

Be a person of action and hell will hate you.

Enjoy the last little bit of reading!

The Screwtape Letters: Twenty Through Twenty-Five

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will largely consist of excerpts I found insightful). They are all tagged summer-reading-project-2018. The schedule is online.

This week we’re looking at letters 20 to 25. Two passages caught my attention this week.

I was struck by how contemporary Lewis’s comments on sexual temptation in letter 20 seem, even though he wrote this book nearly 80 years ago.

We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being “frank” and “healthy” and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist—making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast! (letter 20, page 243)

It was indeed easy to forecast, but now we need merely look around. Sexual dysfunction plagues our society. A study that appeared this week (Pornography Use and Marriage Entry During Early Adulthood: Findings From a Panel Study of Young Americans in prepublication) found that “higher levels of pornography use in emerging adulthood were associated with a lower likelihood of marriage by the final survey wave for men, but not women.” Lewis called it.

The other passage which stood out to me was from letter 21, and I confess it struck uncomfortably close to home:

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tete-а-tete with the friend), that throw him out of gear.… They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen.… The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon his chattels. He is also, in theory, committed a total service of the Enemy; and if the Enemy appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that total service for even one day, he would not refuse.

That is so true. If God asks for fifteen minutes, I’ll give it to Him gladly regardless of what I am doing. But if someone chats with me for fifteen minutes while I’m trying to get a task done, I become impatient and irritable. Yet Jesus clearly said “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). I need to change.

Anyway, that’s some of what I got from this week’s readings. Only two weeks of reading remain!

The Screwtape Letters: Thirteen Through Nineteen

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will largely consist of excerpts I found insightful). They are all tagged summer-reading-project-2018. The schedule is online.

Lewis is on such a roll! This week we’re looking at letters thirteen through nineteen, and insights abound. I fear that if I don’t constrain myself I’ll just cut and paste all of the text.

I’ll limit myself to two excerpts from Lewis along with some brief commentary on them.

The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel. (Letter 13, page 223)

Wow. I had forgotten Lewis said this. This is so good! The author to which Screwtape is alluding is Joseph Butler and you can see the source of the quote at Lewisiana.

Lewis is driving at this: the longer you mean to do something the less likely you are to do it. So get off your good intentions and do something you know you are supposed to do. Obedience unlocks insight. The more you do the more you will understand and then the more opportunities for obedience you will have. It’s a virtuous cycle.

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue.…  The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. (Letter 14, page 225)

This reminds me of Romans 12:3, where Paul teaches us: “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.”

That verse alone would change Stanford if it was taken seriously. “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought.” Instead, Paul says, think of yourself with sober judgment. In other words, self-awareness and honesty lay the foundation for humility. Don’t overestimate your competence but also don’t downplay it. And when you evaluate yourself soberly, do it “in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.” I take that to mean that instead of subjectively comparing ourselves to others, we should measure ourselves against the objective standards of God’s Word and ultimately against the person of Jesus. That’s a whole sermon, though, and that’s not the point of these updates. I just want to remind you that Lewis has some amazing insights and encourage you to finish the summer readings strong!