S&S Podcast 2016.32~The Inner Ring

c-s-lewis

The audio is not that great on this podcast. Sorry about that. 

C.S. Lewis’ address titled The Inner Ring, which he gave at King’s College in 1944, is one of the more important essays for our day. He describes how the lust to belong to an inner circle makes scoundrels of us all. With the advent of the Internet there are all these inner rings we can belong that were previously inaccessible. All of the sudden we can belong to Facebook pages, Instagram groups, websites, and other groups that even 25 years ago we would not have even known about, much less been able to join. The lust to belong it stoked daily. In this podcast I discuss this address and why it matters for Christians today. Here are two quotes:

Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in senses I can’t now explore. But in another sense there is much truth in the schoolboy’s principle “them as asks shan’t have.” To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching.