C.s. Lewis 1942 Quotes

When a teenager in Austin calls upon Hecate, she is doing more than affirming her identity or tapping into her inner peace or communing with nature. She is calling on a demon. If one believes that demons are real, one must assume the demon hears her call. It might well be the case, however, that a being like Hecate would very much prefer her young acolyte to think in purely postmodern, naturalist, self-affirming terms, and practice witchcraft while leaving intact a fundamentally materialist and rationalist worldview. C. S. Lewis predicted and described this phenomena precisely in his 1942 epistolatory novel, The Screwtape Letters,

God plays a great joke on those who would seek after power at any cost. As Lewis reminds us, with his customary humor and wit, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.”6 Kathleen Norris Preface The contents of this book were first given on the air, and then published in three separate parts as Broadcast Talks (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943) and Beyond Personality (1944).

a young man, C. S. Lewis had served in the awful trenches of World War I, and in 1940, when the bombing of Britain began, he took up duties as an air raid warden and gave talks to men in the Royal Air Force, who knew that after just thirteen bombing missions, most of them would be declared dead or missing. Their situation prompted Lewis to speak about the problems of suffering, pain, and evil, work that resulted in his being invited by the BBC to give a series of wartime broadcasts on Christian faith. Delivered over the air from 1942 to 1944, these speeches eventually were gathered into the book we know today as Mere Christianity.