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You heard it before many times. Water is life. But do you know that almost half of the homes on the Navajo Reservation do not have clean running water? With your support, St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School is ready to give water to Navajo families.
So we invite you to help provide this precious gift of life to those in need. Contrary to many average Americans, Navajo families survive on just 10 gallons of water per day. You can help support St. Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. Millions of people have turned to Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic, because it just feels different.
Where other AIs often sound a little robotic, Claude has been designed with special research that informs its character, meaning that Claude just gets it when it comes to empathy and emotional intelligence. That's why Claude has become the if-you-know-you-know choice for dating advice, career coaching, gathering your thoughts for those important life decisions, and more. Give Claude a try for free at Claude.com. That's C-L-A-U-D-E.com, and let us know how you feel the difference. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas.
Throughout the 1940s and 50s, C.S. Lewis's popular fiction Such as the Chronicles of Narnia series, made him a household name in England and the United States. not much has changed since then, except that his books have now earned him worldwide fame. Let's take a look at this man and one of his most famous books. Here's our own Greg Hangler.
On November 22nd, 1963, three towering figures of the 20th century died. President John F. Kennedy was killed by a sniper's bullet in Dallas, Texas. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, succumbed to cancer, and in the exact hour as Kennedy's assassination. In the cloistered scholarly world of Oxford, England, The long career of Clive Staples Lewis ended due to kidney failure.
He was 64 years old. C.S. Lewis's career was defined by his works and Christian apologetic writings. Apologetics meaning the discipline of defending or attempting to prove the truth of Christian doctrines through systematic argumentation and discourse. Here's Lewis scholar Dabney Hart answering the question.
Who was C. S. Lewis? He became the leading Christian apologist of the second half of the 20th century. And he became the author of the Most Important Children's Series.
of the 20th century. He was a complex man. The S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 29, 1898, the younger of two boys. Lewis enrolled at Oxford University, the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and referred to himself at this age as an atheist.
His time at Oxford was cut short at 19 when he volunteered and was sent to the frontline trenches in northern France during World War I. Wounded from an exploding shell after one year in battle. Lewis returned to Oxford University, where he graduated with honors. And it was there where he was then elected to begin his nearly 30-year tenure at Modelin College. Here, with a pint of beer and a pipe, Lewis spent many late evenings at local pubs in philosophical discussion with friends such as J.R.R.
Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, and other members of his late-night social group were also important for his transformation from an atheist to a theist. To a Christian. From about the age of 10 until he was 33, He had been assuming that Christianity was just another myth. A beautiful lie. Here's Lewis Scholars Professor Lyle Dorset and Christopher Mitchell from Wheaton College.
He was the most reluctant convert in the United Kingdom. He didn't really want to be a believer. But he couldn't help himself. He was drawn to God. God kept drawing him to him.
And then he read Chesterton's Everlasting Man, and at that point he began to see. That maybe Christianity was not so intellectually in the dark as he had thought. And so there's this journey. But what he's doing at this point is he's really looking for reasons not to believe in the Christian faith. And yet, without him even trying, things are coming into his life to force him to look at it and say, well, maybe it's not such an open and shut case.
It was also during these conversations at the pub where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien decided to write what we now know as the Chronicles of Narnia. and the Lord of the Rings. Here again is Christopher Mitchell.
Story is told that at a point they sort of agreed that nobody was writing the kind of books that they like to read, so they decided that they would do it. All of C.S. Lewis's 40-plus books have stayed in print since their initial publishing. In fact, Sales have been increasing, with Narnia sales reaching 1 million annually. and his non-fiction Christian writings are not only popular, but they appeal to Christians from all denominations.
Here's Lewis Scholar Dabney Hart. the basis of his widespread popularity Is that his Christian faith was, as he called it, mere Christianity. It was basic Christianity. It was Christianity that created a unifying element. And so Roman Catholics and Baptists and many others, you know, find there um a reinforcement.
A central part of Lewis's so-called mere Christianity is what has become known as Lewis's trilemma. What do you do with a world full of people who say Jesus was a great teacher? Yet they're saying he's not who he said he was. He's a great teacher, but he's not God. And Lewis says, Well, you know, how can he be a great man and a great teacher?
You know, a wonderful man, a wonderful prophet, but yet not who he says he is. He's either a liar, he's a lunatic. or he's who he says he is. This was a brave move considering the secular age Lewis was living in. After all, most of the world saw only two ways to live.
You either became a Nazi and conquered the world, or you became a communist and saved it. Years before Aslan and the White Witch in the fictional kingdom of Narnia was penned, C.S. Lewis explored the theme of good and evil in a thin volume of imaginative letters between two devils. Philosophical and diabolical. Yet entertaining and easily readable by the masses.
The ScrewTape Letters is a satirical portrait of an elderly retired devil named Screwtape. and his nephew, a young demon apprentice tempter, name wormwood. Each of the 31 letters from screw tape were originally published each week in a church newspaper in 1941. The full collection of letters were published on February 9th, 1942. The first edition of 2,000 copies were sold out even before the book was released.
It would be reprinted eight more times before the end of the year and lead Lewis to being put on the cover of Time magazine with the demon screw tape standing on his left shoulder. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of one of the world's greatest writers. C. S. Lewis.
On our American stories. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation's 250th anniversary, I'd like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn't just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses.
Again, go to hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. Life's messy. We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids. But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again. At washable sofas.com, discover Anibay Sofas, the only fully machine-washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699.
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That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from the Washington Post. I'm Christina Quinn. I host Try This. Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges.
Follow Try This right now wherever you're listening. Seriously, try it. You heard it before many times. Water is life. But do you know that almost half of the homes on the Navajo Reservation do not have clean running water?
With your support, St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School is ready to give water to Navajo families.
So we invite you to help provide this precious gift of life to those in need. Contrary to many average Americans, Navajo families survive on just 10 gallons of water per day. You can help support St. Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. Millions of people have turned to Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic, because it just feels different.
Where other AIs often sound a little robotic, Claude has been designed with special research that informs its character, meaning that Claude just gets it when it comes to empathy and emotional intelligence. That's why Claude has become the if-you-know-you-know choice for dating advice, career coaching, gathering your thoughts for those important life decisions, and more. Give Claude a try for free at Claude.com. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot com. And let us know how you feel the difference.
Um And we continue with our American stories and the story of C.S. Lewis. Let's pick up where we last left off. With Craig Hengler telling the story of C.S. Lewis's satirical masterpiece.
The screw tape letters. Here again is Lewis scholar Lyle Dorset. He wanted to do something that would engage people. That would engage their imaginations as well as their minds.
So he settled on this technique of these letters. But one of his purposes is for people to understand. The battle. That's going on in their own souls and in the world around them, the struggle between good and evil, and understand what the stakes are. and how deep these are.
The two devils are rather cunning. They're not interested in finding the one perfect moment by which the young man will turn back on his faith and his God. After all, screw tape advises wormwood, why use adultery when golf will do? Here's Wormwood reading a letter from his uncle's screw tape. And doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness.
But do remember the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the light and out into the nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope.
Soft underfoot. Without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. Your affectionate uncle, Scrutiny. Lewis's point was this. If we could overhear what our enemies say about us, in this case, demonic enemies, It would shock us into realization that we're really in a spiritual battle.
Yeah. Oh, young tempters. Are so predictable. It's all show and flash with you, when in fact it's much better to keep the patient ignorant of your existence. How could we accomplish such a thing?
The worship of sex, some aspects of psychoanalysis, this thing some call a life force. They may prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work, the materialist magician, the man not using but veritably worshipping what he vaguely calls forces while denying the existence of spirits, then the end of the war will be in sight. A wondrous day. The fact that Devils are predominantly comic or absurdly exaggerated figures in the modern imagination will help you.
If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights. And persuade him that since he cannot believe in that, It is an old textbook method of confusing them. He therefore cannot believe in you. Right. Here's ScrewTape explaining to Wormwood that the battle is not a carnal one, as humans often think, but it is spiritual.
But this business of the humans being in love, is that desirable or not? Really, Wormwood, that is the sort of question one expects them to ask. Leave them to discuss whether love, or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles on altars, or teetotalism, or education, are good or bad. Can't you see there is no answer? Oh.
Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind in given circumstances to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the enemy or nearer to us. Got it. Yes, uncle. Uh Temptation and screw tape is distortion, exaggeration, and short lies that the enemy tells the believer so that he will mistrust God. And small sins will snowball into big sins.
Talk to him about moderation in all things. If you can get him to the point of thinking that religion is all very well up to a point. You can feel quite happy about his soul. Brilliant. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all.
And much more amusing. Here's Wormwood reading a follow-up letter from his uncle Screwtape. My dear Wormwood. Obviously, you are making excellent progress. For this reason, I am almost glad to hear that he is still a church-goer and a communicant.
What? I know there are dangers in this, but anything is better than that he should realize the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian, he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements, but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized sin, but only with his vague though uneasy feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately. The purpose of Lewis's screw tape letters was to stimulate a fascinating discourse on the sinful nature of man versus the redemptive nature of God.
As Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard. to be good. Yet despite his lengthy and acclaimed tenure at Oxford, This man was repeatedly denied professorship. His Popularity on sort of a lay level, his willingness to write outside the academic community, to write for the common person, and especially to write theology, to write Christianity, and to do it so boldly, and actually to attack his colleagues' positions. It didn't make him popular.
Despite being shunned by his colleagues in academia, Lewis was besieged by countless letters from fans in the English speaking world, and he personally responded to every single one. Considered by many, if not most, to be the greatest Christian writer in the English language, CS Lewis has left an unmatched legacy. Here again is Lyle Dorset, Christopher Mitchell, and Walter Hooper. Literary Advisor to the Lewis Estate. I consider Lewis's greatest legacy being that the 30-some books he wrote.
In many genres, all the writing he did.
Okay. That many, many lives during his lifetime and continuing to this day have been utterly. changed because of what he did. Broken people, wounded people, people bound up in all kinds of things they wanted to be free from. have found freedom through Jesus Christ that Lewis's books pointed to.
I certainly was one of those and I am not unique. You may not at the end of the day agree with him, but Christianity is no longer this sort of mindless believism, but there's a reason for accepting these things, and you just can't write it off. And those who do, I think, have not really listened to him.
Well, in other writers, you've been finding you've been reading You get a corner the curtain is raised. You've got a little bit of the truth. With Lewis the big curtains just Open up wide, they extend all the way to the side of the theater, and you see. Everything that's in front of you. You see more than you've ever seen before.
To see through Lewis's eyes is to see the universe almost as I think God sees it. Lewis admitted that while the writing process for the screw tape letters was easy, He confessed. Being in the mindset of a demon had its consequences. It almost smothered me before I was done. But Lewis's readers are eternally grateful.
As the New Yorker stated, if wit and wisdom Style and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates. Mr. Lewis will be among the angels. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And I love that line.
No man knows how bad he is. until he tries to be good. And of course, the screw tape letters may be the best entrance point to Christianity. 'Cause it starts with life as seen by demons, by devils. A masterpiece of humor, wit, and grace.
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Terms apply. If you eat too many ultra-processed foods, you could be starving your gut microbes, and they'll get hangry. That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from the Washington Post. I'm Christina Quinn.
I host Try This. Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges. Follow Try This right now wherever you're listening. Seriously, try it. Every day has a to-do list, but adding enjoy Belveta to yours can help you knock out the rest of it.
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