Tag: summer reading project 2025

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.