"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Andrew interviewed Max McLean, founder and artistic director of the Fellowship for Performing Arts, who have brought many of Lewis’ works to life on the stage, and who will soon be releasing a movie about Lewis’ life, The Most Reluctant Convert, which will be released on November 3rd this year.
In anticipation of Season 4, Matt sat down and shared some of his favourite quotations from the book which we will be reading this Season, The Screwtape Letters…
S3E00: “Season 4 Trailer” (Download)
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The roadmap for Season 4 is available here.
Time Stamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:11 – Welcome
01:35 – Book Setup
02:16 – Quotations
13:23 – Closing Remarks
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
No Skype Session today!
Show Notes
There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a I brief sojourn in the Enemy’s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour…
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 2
If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.
Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 4
He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 8
…the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 9
The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 18
It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual “taste”. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 20
You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 12
You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.
You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 9
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 12
Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 22
To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 29
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
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 14
Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 16
You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 13
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…
Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 29
There are many worrying statistics concerning the Catholic Faith in the USA. One in ten Americans consider themselves ex-Catholics. In fact, if “ex-Catholics” were counted as their own religious group, they would be the third-largest denomination, right after Catholics and Baptists. As many as 100,000 drift away from the Faith each year. These figures should give us serious pause for thought since, as Christians, we are called to evangelize the world, to witness to Jesus Christ and His Church.
Today I’d like to begin a series of posts which are based on a talk I recently gave at my parish. The talk was entitled “Catholics Come Home”.
Over the next two posts, I would like to tell a little bit my own story, of my journey away from and eventual return to the Catholic Church. I’ve told parts of this story before, but in this retelling I hope to focus on some of the things which attracted and repelled me along the way. In subsequent posts, I’ll attempt to pull these experiences together and distill them into a list of suggestions as to what can be done to draw people back to the Church.
My friend Joe is studying at the North American College in Rome, where he’s surrounded by brilliant English-speaking Catholics from around the globe: classmates, professors, and various luminaries who pass through their halls while doing more important things. Together with some of his classmates, they’ve decided to take advantage of this fact and create a regular Catholic podcast: interviewing experts in liturgy, theology, Church history, and several other fields.
The result is Catholic Bytes podcast (CatholicBytesPodcast.com): it’s designed to be frequent (once or twice a week), short (under 10 minutes), clear (we’ve got multiple reviewers doing quality control), and orthodox. Oh, and the first episode got released today…enjoy 🙂
Yesterday I began of my “Catholics Come Home” blog series. I spoke about my faith journey from childhood through to my university years. Today I’d like to pick up the story again…
The story ended yesterday with my final months at university. I was part of a strong community and I was growing in my faith. Things were good.
However, after university, things did not go so well. I moved to a new town for work and, although I did not move far away, I had virtually no contact with anyone from either the Chaplaincy or from Verbum Dei. In fact, during the months which followed, only one person took the time to reach out to me from my university years. I felt rather abandoned. It felt like I was out of sight, and therefore out of mind. Those months were particularly trying for me since, soon after moving to this new town, my employer went bankrupt, leaving me unemployed.
I did not fare any better in parish life. After experiencing the welcoming communities of Verbum Dei and my University Chaplaincy, I was reintroduced to the more typical Catholic parish life. Each Sunday I rose early and walked a long way through the cold to Mass. Upon arrival, I was greeted by no one. The music was abysmal and the preaching was utterly uninspiring. Honestly, I felt I could have done a better job. There were no parish groups for me to join. There was nobody of my own age. There was no coffee after Mass and no real socializing of which to speak. I was just another anonymous parishioner who slipped in, heard Mass and then slipped back out. I had no personal contact at that parish whatsoever.
This afternoon I wanted to advertise the upcoming Be A Man! event. At the end of this month, Matt Fradd, the most recent addition to the Catholic Answers team, will be recording his latest talk before a live audience of men here in San Diego. Here’s some of the event blurb from the flier:
In the first part…[Matthew] invites the men to listen to powerful, moving, and often-times hilarious stories. Then, he poses questions to show the men, or perhaps even to convince them, that who they desire to be, and who God commands them to be, is in fact the same man.
In the second part of his talk, Matthew lays out five rules that every man must break (yes, that’s right, break) if he wants to fulfill his deepest desires and follow God’s commands.
Matt really knows what he’s talking about. He’s an Australian who married a Texan and, quite frankly, it doesn’t get much more manly that that!
I spoke to Matt on the phone a few weeks ago and we bonded over the highlights of Australian culture (Tim Tams and The Castle), as well people’s inability to identify our accents:
The most common question I get asked is “Are you Australian?” Well, my friends, you now have the opportunity to come and hear what a real Australian sounds like.
Today I speak to Dr. Louis Markos, Professor in English at Houston Baptist University and author of the book Heaven and Hell: Visions of the Afterlife in the Western Poetic Tradition. In this work, Professor Markos devotes a chapter to The Great Divorce, as well as the book to which Lewis was responding, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Dr. Markos is a fount of knowledge and I learned so much in this interview. In the episode, Dr. Markos explains to us why the Pagan classics are important, how the Romantics reinterpreted earlier works to re-imagine good, evil, Heaven and Hell…
S2E22: “After Hours” with Louis Markos (Download)
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