The Eagle and Child, episode two.

Mere Christianity.

Book one, preface, part two.

Hello, and welcome to the Eagle and Child, the hallowed pub of the Inklings.

This is the podcast where each week I share a beer with my friend Matt and we discuss the

writings of the author known to the world as Clive Staples Lewis, or C.S. Lewis, or Jack to his

friends. My name is David, and today in the podcast we're going to be continuing to work our

way through mere Christianity, and in particular the preface. And I'm going to be

joined once again by my fellow CS Lewis enthusiast, Matt. Thank you, David. And as always,

it is a pleasure to be here. And as we mentioned last time, the preface, as you already have

experienced, is packed with great stuff. This is the continuation of it, so I'm excited to unpack it further.

And as we mentioned in the inaugural episode, we are not CS Lewis experts. We just love this guy.

So if you have issue with anything that we say or anything that CS Lewis says, please feel

free to reach out to us on Twitter, at Pints with Jack.

So, in the last episode, we discussed the preface where Jack talks about the history of the material,

how mere Christianity began life as a series of radio talks, and also the kind of book that he's trying to write,

about this idea of mere Christianity, how he's not going to help you choose a denomination.

And we began to look at why he says he didn't address certain issues. Sometimes he says he was on the fence, other times he wasn't. And if he doesn't address an issue, you can't even tell

if he thought it important or unimportant. Well, we're now going to pick it up once more, and he begins

by mentioning two particular issues he's not going to talk about. The first one is the Blessed

Virgin Mary. Here's what he says. The Roman Catholic beliefs on the subject are held not only with

the ordinary fervor that attaches to all sincere religious belief, but with chivalrous sensibility that a man feels when the honor of his mother

...