Screwtape Letters

NarniaFan95

Active member
I'VE GOT DA POWA-because I found a cheap paperback copy of the Screwtape Letters. I've been searching for it since..Ummm....Last February.
 
Wow - took you that long to find a copy of Screwtape? In my experience, that's one of the most available of Lewis' books. I hope you enjoy it - just remember that Lewis is a subtle and clever writer, so when he writes from a devil's "perspective", he does it very well!
 
At one point in The Screwtape Letters (p. 157 in my copy, at the end of letter 28), Screwtape says that "the majority of the human race dies in infancy". Where is he getting this? Did they have abortion back then? Would he be counting that, maybe?
 
No. Though that point could be applicable today, Lewis was harking back to the time when infant mortality was much higher than it is now. Remember, Screwtape's career had lasted millenia by this time!
 
Oh...that makes sense! Screwtape was around for a long time. I was pretty confused by that part before; it isn't like it's a big deal to the story, but it was just something that didn't make sense to me! Thanks for your help!
 
A family friend of ours, Max McLean, does the Screwtape letters on Broadway. He's really good at it, and I had the pleasure to see it when he came to Austin this past year. If he's ever in your area, you should go see him, he's really good!!
 
I'm actually going to be seeing a performance of the Screwtape Letters at Playhouse Square (I think) in Cleveland, I shall have to come here and report how it is
 
So, I had to dig to find this thread. Really dig (hunt from the beginning of time). This is the appropriate spot for this. I recently had the joy of sharing Screwtape with some of the inmates under my care. It was interesting watching them go through it. I feel like it had some impact on them. Yesterday, I was running the "book cart" through the male cells and had another one ask about CS Lewis books and he now wants to read what is probably my favorite "adult" CS Lewis book. Here is to hoping that Screwtape will lose more due to this interest.
 
The Screwtape Letters is one of my favourite books by Lewis. A very perceptive books about the human condition and our capacity for sin and self deception and at times a very funny book as well. The rant Screwtape goes into about the girlfriend of his nephew's 'patient' is just hysterical!
 
Between the letter about the girl (I only hope Screwtape gets as mad about me) and the last letter it is hard to not say that Screwtape is my favorite.
 
The most useful of all the many good concepts in "Screwtape" is his idiom for a phenomenon I was already aware of even before I became a Christian. Living through the hippie era and what followed it, I could easily see how people "guarded against" non-existent or no-longer-current evils, while refusing to see ACTUAL PRESENT EVILS. Thus, with Nazi Germany long gone and the Soviet Union still up and running at that time, novelists and screenwriters STILL INSISTED on ignoring actual Communist brutality, while pretending over and over and over and over and over that the Nazis were coming back any minute.

This is the form of willful stupidity that Lewis, through Screwtape, cleverly described as "rushing about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under."
 
Letting periods of dryness, physical and spiritual, be the foundation for deeper renewal by continuing to do the things you need to do, even though you don't feel like it.
 
The Screwtape Letters was the very first C.S. Lewis book I ever read. Yep. That's right. I was in my twenties and had never read The Chronicles of Narnia. I saw a little bit of the animated LWW as a child and, frankly, didn't like it. (It scared me.)

But as an adult, I picked TSL to read while traveling and it was the most amazing and insightful book I had ever read up to that time (excluding The Bible, of course). It didn't take long to read, of course. I found myself wishing it could be longer.

The most powerful line, I think, was this:

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.
 
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