The Screwtape Letters
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Product Description
Screwtape tries to teach his apprentice/nephew, Wormwood, how to win over the souls of humans.Amazon.com Review
Who among us has never wondered if there might not really be a tempter sitting on our shoulders or dogging our steps? C.S. Lewis dispels all doubts. In The Screwtape Letters, one of his bestselling works, we are made privy to the instructional correspondence between a senior demon, Screwtape, and his wannabe diabolical nephew Wormwood. As mentor, Screwtape coaches Wormwood in the finer points, tempting his “uncomplaining” away from God.
Each letter is a masterpiece of back theology, giving the reader an inside look at the thinking and means of temptation. Tempters, according to Lewis, have two motives: the first is dread of punishment, the second a hunger to consume or dominate additional beings. On the additional hand, the goal of the Creator is to woo us unto himself or to transform us through his like from “tools into servants and servants into sons.” It is the dichotomy between being consumed and subsumed completely into another’s identity or being liberated to be utterly ourselves that Lewis explores with his razor-sharp insight and wit.
The most brilliant feature of The Screwtape Letters may be likening hell to a bureaucracy in which “everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” We all know bureaucracies, be it the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, or one of our own building. So we each know the temptations that slowly lure us into hell. If you’ve never read Lewis, The Screwtape Letters is a fantastic place to start. And if you know Lewis, but haven’t read this, you’ve missed one of his core writings. –Patricia Klein
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Another step in the Christian brain-washing process. If you delight in seeing intellectual inquiry described as sin, you’ll like this book.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Sinclair Lewis is a brilliant writer. His works are more poignant today than when he first wrote them. Excellent words for everyone, believer or not.
Melita Thorpe
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I read this book when I was about ten and really liked it. Now, over thirty years later, I have reread it. I was surprised to see that the logic was so sophomoric. I reflect this would be a excellent book for a child, but for a name with a college education the opinion are too strained to provide enjoyment.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book was the selection for my reader’s group this month and I must say, no offense to the member who selected it, that I couldn’t get pass the third chapter. It’s just a small too heavy for a summer read. It is problably best left for a person who is in the mood to delve into the corruption of human scenery. Maybe I’ll get back to it when the weather is dreary and I am already depressed.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Try as I may, I find C.S.Lewis nearly impossible to read. Maybe that is because I have small interest in living a excellent Christian life — as described by a British professor of literature, writing at the time of the second world war.
His basis premise seems to be that God and the Devil have some “interest” in the way human beings are living their lives. Both are trying to influence that. I just can’t for the life of me know why a God would want to do that. I mean if God is all powerful why couldn’t he just make the perfect man and be done with it, why would he have to go around trying to find ways to improve on his design? And what benefit does the devil get by getting the human to do evil and collecting the odd soul? The whole theme is patently ridiculous. And to try to cast an argument, which is dubious at best, using the technique of diabolic ventriloquism or photographic negative is mind boggling. At the end what are we supposed to get out of this — pure knowledge? an understanding of Lewis’ philosophy? or just a chuckle? If it is the chuckle, then I would apportion the causes of such a chuckle into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. And I would relegate Lewis to the offhand. “It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, as a replacement for of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between persons who practice it.” (Page 51 Screwtape.)
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5