Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast.

I'm Jeremiah Regan.

And I'm Juan Dabalos.

We are back with C.S. Lewis on Christianity.

We're going on to the next lecture, enjoyment and contemplation.

I'm excited to go into this lecture because it explains something that became really important

for me to understand in how Lewis views the world, and it'll be important for the next lectures

on how Lewis views prayer in the Bible and suffering in death and heaven and hell.

And that's the idea of the difference between, as the name

of the lecture suggests, enjoyment and contemplation. So what you're finding about Lewis is the way he

views the world is the way, the various ways he views the world. That's right. And how things,

he has a very comprehensive structure of an understanding of the world. And so things are connected.

It's not just he has this idea that's random and unconnected with everything else. And so the way

he views enjoyment and contemplation affects the way he views other things like prayer.

You see that come out in his fiction as well as his nonfiction. There's many scenes in the Narnia

books or in the space trilogy about

enjoyment, reveling, celebrating, feasts, and celebrations. And that's all enjoyment, but there's

also instances in which deep thought is required. And so it's not enjoyment versus contemplation.

It's enjoyment and contemplation. There're two separate activities for different circumstances.

Yeah, and what I love about this, the course in general, is that Dr. Michael Ward,

who teaches the course, goes into writings by Lewis that are less well known.

Even, you know, I've read most of Lewis's books, and I had never read this essay called

...