Tag: summer reading project 2025

The Four Loves: Friendship

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. 

First, I should men­tion that I was sup­posed to post this last week but got dis­tract­ed by some trav­el and lost my sense of which week it was.

Sec­ond, I should men­tion that I post­ed some thoughts on this chap­ter back in 2018 on a pre­vi­ous sum­mer read-through. My obser­va­tions here are slight­ly dif­fer­ent, so con­sid­er check­ing out that pre­vi­ous post (which includes a humor­ous video).

Today we’re going to look at Lewis’s thoughts on friend­ship (phil­ia / φιλία). This chap­ter is full of wis­dom, and it also includes some thoughts that might push you a bit. If you haven’t read it (or if you did and are hun­gry for more), the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle chan­nel has Lewis giv­ing the lec­ture upon which this chap­ter is based. The tran­script of his speech is also avail­able. 

With the pre­am­ble out of the way, here are some thoughts from this read­ing:

Some of the most strik­ing insights in this chap­ter revolve around the unique nature of friend­ship. Unlike oth­er forms of love, friend­ship is com­plete­ly option­al and inher­ent­ly cen­tered on com­mon inter­ests. As Lewis says:

Friend­ship aris­es out of mere Com­pan­ion­ship when two or more of the com­pan­ions dis­cov­er that they have in com­mon some insight or inter­est or even taste which the oth­ers do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique trea­sure (or bur­den). The typ­i­cal expres­sion of open­ing Friend­ship would be some­thing like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

It can be almost any­thing that trig­gers a friend­ship: a hob­by, a fan­dom, a shared expe­ri­ence, or even a shared annoy­ance. Mov­ing from acquain­tance­ship to friend­ship usu­al­ly requires dis­cov­er­ing some com­mon­al­i­ty. Grasp­ing this explains why some peo­ple strug­gle to make friends (as opposed to com­pan­ions):

That is why those pathet­ic peo­ple who simply“want friends” can nev­er make any. The very con­di­tion of hav­ing Friends is that we should want some­thing else besides Friends. Where the truth­ful answer to the ques­tion Do you see the same truth? would be “I see noth­ing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no Friend­ship can arise though Affec­tion of course may. There would be noth­ing for the Friend­ship to be about; and Friend­ship must be about some­thing, even if it were only an enthu­si­asm for domi­noes or white mice. Those who have noth­ing can share noth­ing; those who are going nowhere can have no fel­low-trav­ellers.

And so if you strug­gle with forg­ing friend­ships, find some­thing you care about and look for some­one who also cares about that thing.

This sug­gests that if you are part of Chi Alpha at Stan­ford, then you’re well-poised to devel­op great friends. You’ve already got your faith in com­mon, and on top of that you both have the expe­ri­ence of being a stu­dent at Stan­ford, and in addi­tion you have the expe­ri­ence of Chi Alpha. That may already be enough to trig­ger a friend­ship, and if you add to that mix even just one more thing like a cer­tain sport or a spe­cif­ic fan­dom or a shared sense of humor then the poten­tial for a sig­nif­i­cant friend­ship is quite high. 

There are, how­ev­er, bar­ri­ers. Lewis at one point observes that if the world ever makes “pri­va­cy and unplanned leisure impos­si­ble” then we will cre­ate a world “where all are Com­pan­ions and none are Friends.”

That is a keen insight, and it leads me to make this sor­row­ful obser­va­tion: Stan­ford stu­dents, you are play­ing on hard mode. The way we use our phones makes moments of true pri­va­cy hard­er and hard­er to find (social media is often a blight, and the way some of you share your loca­tions with each oth­er is a source of much need­less dra­ma), and the typ­i­cal Stan­ford sched­ule means that unplanned leisure is often noth­ing more than a dream. If you want to deep­en your friend­ships, rebel against the tyran­ny of your phone and also against the insane demands Stan­ford cul­ture puts upon your time.

Despite these chal­lenges, be encour­aged! As Lewis reminds us:

…we think we have cho­sen our peers. In real­i­ty, a few years’ dif­fer­ence in the dates of our births, a few more miles between cer­tain hous­es, the choice of one uni­ver­si­ty instead of anoth­er, post­ing to dif­fer­ent reg­i­ments, the acci­dent of a top­ic being raised or not raised at a first meet­ing any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Chris­t­ian, there are, strict­ly speak­ing, no chances. A secret Mas­ter of the Cer­e­monies has been at work. Christ, who said to the dis­ci­ples “Ye have not cho­sen me, but I have cho­sen you,” can tru­ly say to every group of Chris­t­ian friends “You have not cho­sen one anoth­er but I have cho­sen you for one anoth­er.”

So if you lack friend­ships, pray that God opens your eyes to see that poten­tial friends are already around you, and fur­ther pray that He bless­es you with self-aware­ness and wis­dom as you build those rela­tion­ships.

And if you have friends, thank God for them and be care­ful to con­tin­ue cul­ti­vat­ing those rela­tion­ships.

In either case, slow down (cre­ate space for unplanned leisure) and try to relate to your phones and social media in such a way that you’ve got moments of pri­va­cy.

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.