What You'll Learn:
In a conversation at his home on the outskirts of Oxford, England, Lewis told his long-time friend and editor Walter Hooper that he didn’t read newspapers anymore. He considered them among the most meager forms of historical record. For anyone who “absolutely must” read the paper, Lewis good-humoredly recommended an accompanying “mouthwash,” like The Lord of Rings or other great books. Despite Lewis’ personal aversion to newspapers, he never condemned those who chose to read the news, and he wrote short essays for many magazines and newspapers himself. Present Concerns is a collection of such articles on a range of subjects. Even without being immersed in the endless minutiae of daily news (or perhaps because of it), Lewis offers a depth of insight in his journalistic essays that remains prescient many decades later.
Key Insights:
- The ideal of chivalry has become horribly deformed and deserves revisiting.
- We don’t need democracy because people are good; we need it because people are fallen.
- There are three kinds of people in the world: the unsurrendered, the partially surrendered, and the fully surrendered.
- Just because we learn of one more way that we could die doesn’t mean we have to fall to pieces over it.
- We have only just begun to understand life’s truest pleasures.
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