Close

Close

The host says: “The paper is yours. So is the next question.” No pledge, donation, or recruitment pitch follows. Someone declining the certificate has not passed a secret higher test.

A question does not require a ceremony. The ceremony is allowed to be enjoyable anyway.

The Society honors Lewis as a prophet in its own vocabulary: an influential writer whose fiction helps readers examine themselves. The title does not make his statements infallible, nor make him an adherent of the Society.

Read the voice, not just the sentence

Screwtape is the senior demon and Wormwood his nephew. The letters stage the tempter’s reasoning. Lewis’s Preface warns that Screwtape is a liar; an apparently confident explanation may expose the speaker as well as the patient. A simple reversal of every line is not an adequate reading method.

READING CONVERSATION Preface, p. 2; Letter 4, pp. 9–10; Letter 31, pp. 63–64.

Let disagreement remain named

Lewis’s book argues within Christian accounts of a personal God, sin, grace, and salvation. Its teaching about marriage, family, and divine ownership is not silently adopted as SOSP doctrine. His account of timelessness is a theological argument, not experimental evidence for the Society’s cosmology.

READING CONVERSATION Letters 18, 21, 27; pp. 37–38, 42–44, 55–56.

The reading relationship

On the following pages, each entry first describes the supplied Lewis letter and then gives a Society question. The question is our response, not his concealed conclusion. The supplied Preface and all 31 letters are the scope of this map; no later essays are implied.

Gratitude can keep company with disagreement.