An Intercollegiate Studies Institute Partner Feature

released 5/10/2024

In the first chapter of The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis warned that education that refuses to inculcate virtue eliminates the very capacity that makes us human: the ordering of “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.” In an article titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies.

This article is provided courtesy of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and it is read by Ken Myers.

16 minutes

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For the Fall 2018 Areopagus Lecture, philosopher Paul Tyson, in his talk entitled “Escaping the Silver Chair: Renewed Minds and Our Vision of Reality,” explored how the Christian responsibility “to repent” involves more than expressing feelings of regret for moral wrong-doing and the desire to reform. Rather, the New Testament call to “repentance,” the English rendition of the Greek word metanoia, is inseparable from radically reenvisioning what is “really real.” St. Paul’s admonition that we be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” — in other words, metanoia — invokes a process that demands the recognition and rejection of various false enchantments of this world. With the help of C. S. Lewis’s story The Silver Chair, however, we realize that identifying and then escaping the ways in which we are bewitched is no easy task.

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