Ep. 52: The Indispensable Virtue
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2021
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this second episode on C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, Spencer Klavan explores the lead-up to the book's climactic moment, and the philosophy of courage that lies behind it. Courage is "every virtue at the testing point"—the thing which, in Lewis's day as well as ours, we cannot do without.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today I want to talk about courage and the hypnosis of the devil. |
| 0:09.2 | We are on part two of our two-part exploration of CS Lewis's |
| 0:14.6 | Screwtaped Letters. Last week I talked about sex and really I talked about love and romance |
| 0:21.0 | as one of the central crisis points for the battle between heaven and hell over an individual |
| 0:27.1 | human soul. This week I want to talk about courage and courage is a topic that has been |
| 0:35.6 | much on my mind of late and I think a lot of people have been noticing a deficiency of courage. |
| 0:42.5 | I know that I have listeners who have a range of opinions about things like coronavirus |
| 0:47.2 | lockdowns and I think we probably all who are involved in this show were pretty anti things |
| 0:53.9 | like critical race theory and you know woke teaching in schools but the thing that unites all |
| 1:00.4 | of these issues is that in order for the spell to be broken in order for the school to stop |
| 1:10.2 | teaching these poisonous ideas about you know white people being inherently guilty by birth. |
| 1:16.8 | In order for the unconstitutional lockdown to end in order for the mask mandate to be pushed aside |
| 1:25.6 | right you need people to stand up and show courage and it's not entirely politically correct to say |
| 1:32.4 | but there is something inherent in the nature of manhood and that makes it particularly incumbent |
| 1:37.2 | upon men to to show courage and there is no substitute for it right when people write to me or they |
| 1:44.6 | they DM me and they ask you know how do I push back I I'm worried about you know getting a bad grade |
| 1:51.7 | and in college but I want to push back against my crazy leftist professor rate. Unfortunately |
| 1:58.0 | there is no substitute for taking courageous action and then finding of course when you do that |
| 2:04.6 | there are many people who have been thinking yeah this is crazy this is bad but I didn't have the |
| 2:09.2 | strength to speak up and now I see this person speaking up and I'm going to be courageous I'm going |
| 2:13.4 | to go forward right there is there's just no getting around the need for that and as we'll get to |
| 2:18.1 | right I mentioned last week how Lewis emphasizes in the screw tape letters that your feelings don't |
... |
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