Podcasts about The Screwtape Letters

Join us for Shakespeare Summer!If you've been around the Read-Aloud Revival for a minute, you might know that C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is one of my all-time favorite books. It's the book I have read and re-read the most, and it's also the source of some of my favorite read-aloud memories with my young adult son.Today's guest has written a book in a similar style with the modern woman in mind, and in this episode we talk about how the enemy is working the hearts and minds of women today. Emily Wilson Hussem is the author of Sincerely Stoneheart: Unmask the Enemy's Lies, Find the Truth That Sets You Free, as well as a speaker and YouTuber who shares her faith around the world. It was a delight to have her on the show. In this episode, you'll hear: How Emily adapted C. S. Lewis's format to get to the heart of the most common struggles in women's livesWhy embracing friendship, connection, and community is key to thriving as women and mothersThe ways distraction, comparison, and dissatisfaction all pull us away from living in the truth of our identities as beloved daughters of God Learn more about Sarah Mackenzie:Read-Aloud RevivalWaxwing BooksSubscribe to the NewsletterFind the rest of the show notes at: readaloudrevival.com/emily-wilson

Patrick encourages men and women grappling with lust to focus on modesty, purity, and self-control in today’s world. He fields a deeply personal call about grief, the ache of unanswered prayers, and the daily effort to pursue virtue, offering compassion, practical wisdom, and the rock-solid hope found in Scripture and community. Sudden moments of humor and heartfelt support blend with advice on modest dress, addiction battles, and the sacred duty to lift up one another—whether that means praying for strangers or connecting a hurting listener with the Knights of Columbus. Laurie - I just wanted to encourage men in custody of eyes. The world, flesh and devil are trying to get us to forget who we are. Men, you are made for this. (01:41) Lisa - The Bible says ask and you shall receive. Did you have any words of comfort for those who don’t get their prayers answered? (06:12) Paul - I agree with you about lust addiction. Praying a daily Rosary and having custody of the eyes helps. I rely on the strength of my guardian angel. (14:07) Katie (email) – Women, please dress modestly. We can help the fight. (20:29) Robert - Custody of the eyes: I turn away and thank God for their beauty instead of ruminating on it. (21:20) Janet – It used to bother me a great deal when I saw women scantily clad. I confessed my anger. I am always praying for them when I see them, it really relieves me of anxiety and angst. (22:08) Ben - CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters helped me mentally with lust. (24:47) Tom – I have Cerebral Palsy and am being mistreated where I live. How can I deal with this without falling into sin? (28:05) Maria – The friend of my grandson dresses very skimpy. I told him I didn’t like how she was dressed. My family was upset with me for saying this. (39:52) Lisette - My daughter received Voodoo dolls as gift (43:53)

In today's episode, I'm sharing a powerful and uncomfortable truth: you can be incredibly productive and still be wildly ineffective. If you've ever felt like your days are full but your life feels stuck — this is for you. I'm drawing inspiration from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis — a book where the devil teaches his apprentice how to keep someone distracted from living a meaningful, intentional life. One of the strategies? Keep them trapped in their to-do list. Make them believe that daily logistics are real life — and never let them question it. We're talking about: The danger of mistaking motion for progress How the “secondary” quietly replaces the “primary” Why the tasks that feel urgent often aren't important How to reframe your days around what truly matters This isn't about doing less — it's about making room for what's real. Join me inside The Consistency Course

In this episode of Thinking Out Loud, Cameron and Nathan wade into the chaos of current global events—from missile strikes in Iran to plane crashes in India—and ask a critical theological question: how should Christians respond to a world that feels like it's unraveling? Rather than offering false certainty or prophetic guesswork, they reflect on the emotional and spiritual toll of nonstop news and the dangers of distraction, drawing from Scripture, C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, and their own lived experiences. This episode challenges believers to reclaim attention, prioritize the local over the global, and discern the difference between what's simply a problem and what is your problem. For Christians seeking thoughtful, biblically grounded dialogue in a noisy world, this conversation offers clarity, conviction, and grace.DONATE LINK: https://toltogether.com/donate BOOK A SPEAKER: https://toltogether.com/book-a-speakerJOIN TOL CONNECT: https://toltogether.com/tol-connect TOL Connect is an online forum where TOL listeners can continue the conversation begun on the podcast.

Cooper and his cousin, Hayden, discuss their summer reading so far. The books they talk about include but are not limited to: The Once and Future King by T.H. White, What it Means to be Protestant by Gavin Ortlund, and two of C.S. Lewis's works: the Screwtape Letters and Miracles. Listen and enjoy!FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM:@bookinitpodCHECK OUT OUR WEBSITE:https://412podcasting.comSUPPORT US HERE:https://patreon.com/bookinit TEXT US HERE!

The Pentagon confessed to decades of deliberately spreading UFO conspiracy theories to cover up secret military programs (03:46) CS Lewis' ‘The Screwtape Letters’ heading to big screen in adaptation from Max McLean (12:31) Josh – Is burning incense,ok? Can I work on music on Sundays? (22:35) Jose – What are the rules of Sunday obligation? Is it a sin to masturbate? (25:52) Isabella (10-years-old) - If there is no sorrow in heaven, why is Mary the Queen of Sorrows? (38:24) Jessica - Patrick helped me avoid getting my tubes tied and now I’m having a baby boy! (44:46)

Dr. Marion De La Torre joins Jim and Joy to speak about his book “The Screwtape Letters and the Catechism,” tying together the significant resources for growing spiritual courage.

When a skeptical professor steps into the mind of a former student's fiancée, he discovers a surreal landscape shaped by vanity, obsession, and alarming emptiness. A sharp and unsettling exploration of how our inner worlds reveal far more than we intend. The Shoddy Lands by C. S. Lewis. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.Clive Staples Lewis, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1898. In 1917, during the height of World War I, he enlisted in the British Army and was wounded in combat less than a year later.Though best known for his beloved children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia—seven books published throughout the 1950s—Lewis also made a lasting mark with The Screwtape Letters in the 1940s, and his philosophical sci-fi epic, The Space Trilogy, written in the 1930s and '40s.While he authored more than 30 books in his lifetime, Lewis rarely ventured into short fiction. Today's featured tale marks a special occasion: his first story published in an American fantasy and science fiction magazine. From the February 1956 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning on page 68, The Shoddy Lands by C. S. Lewis.…Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, A brief tale of the dismal success of a scientist's experiment. Anton's Last Dream by Edwin Baird.☕ Buy Me a Coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/scottsV===========================Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TheLostSciFiPodcastTwitter - https://x.com/LostSciFiPodInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/lostscifiguyThreads - https://www.threads.net/@scottscifiguy=========================== ❤️ ❤️ Thanks to All Our Listeners Who Bought Us a Coffee$200 Someone$100 Tony from the Future$75 James Van Maanenberg$50 Anonymous Listener$25 Someone, Eaten by a Grue, Jeff Lussenden, Fred Sieber, Anne, Craig Hamilton, Dave Wiseman, Bromite Thrip, Marwin de Haan, Future Space Engineer, Fressie, Kevin Eckert, Stephen Kagan, James Van Maanenberg, Irma Stolfo, Josh Jennings, Leber8tr, Conrad Chaffee, Anonymous Listener$15 Every Month Someone$15 Someone, Carolyn Guthleben, Patrick McLendon, Curious Jon, Buz C., Fressie, Anonymous Listener$10 Anonymous Listener$5 Denis Kalinin, Timothy Buckley, Andre'a, Martin Brown, Ron McFarlan, Tif Love, Chrystene, Richard Hoffman, Anonymous Listener Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 Santi: Hi, this is a special episode of Statecraft. I've got a wonderful guest host with me today. Kyla Scanlon: Hey, I'm Kyla Scanlon! I'm the author of a book called In This Economy and an economic commentator. Santi: Kyla has joined me today for a couple reasons. One, I'm a big fan of her newsletter: it's about economics, among many other things. She had a great piece recently on what we can learn from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, which is a favorite book of mine.Kyla's also on today because we're interviewing Wally Adeyemo, who was the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the Biden administration. We figured we each had questions we wanted answered.Kyla: Yeah, I've had the opportunity to interview Wally a couple times during the Biden administration, and I wanted to see where he thinks things are at now. He played a key role in implementing the Inflation Reduction Act, financial sanctions on Russia, and a whole bunch of other things.Santi: For my part, I'm stuck on Wally's role in setting up the IRS's Direct File program, where you can file your taxes for free directly through the IRS instead of paying TurboTax a hundred bucks to do it. “Good governance types” tend to love Direct File, but the current admin is thinking of killing it. I wanted to understand how the program got rolled out, how Wally would respond to criticisms of the program, and what he learned from building something in government, which now may disappear.Kyla, you've talked to Wally before. How did that conversation go? Kyla: I actually was able to go to his office in D.C., and I talked to a couple of key people in the Biden administration: Jared Bernstein, the former chair of the CEA, and Daniel Hornung, who was at the National Economic Council.We're talking to Wally on the day that the House passed the one big beautiful bill. There's also so much happening financially, like the bond market is totally rebelling against the US government right now. I'm really curious how he thinks things are, as a key player in the last administration.Santi: Wally, you've spent most of your career in Democratic Party institutions. You worked on the Kerry presidential campaign in 2004. You served in the Obama admin. You were the first chief of staff to the CFPB, the president of the Obama Foundation, and, most recently, Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Biden admin.30,000ft question: How do you see the Democratic Party today?My view is that we continue to be the party that cares deeply about working-class people, but we haven't done a good job of communicating that to people, especially when it comes to the things that matter most to them. From my standpoint, it's costs: things in America cost too much for a working-class family.I want to make sure I define working class: I think about people who make under $100,000 a year, many of whom don't own homes on the coast or don't own a significant amount of stocks (which means they haven't seen the asset appreciation that's led to a great deal of wealth creation over the last several decades). When you define it that way, 81% of Americans sit in that category of people. Despite the fact that they've seen their median incomes rise 5-10% over the last five years, they've seen the cost of the things they care about rise even faster.We haven't had a clear-cut agenda focused on the standard of living, which I think is the thing that matters most to Americans today.Santi: There are folks who would say the problem for Democrats wasn't that they couldn't communicate clearly, or that they didn't have a governing agenda, but that they couldn't execute their agenda the way they hoped to in the time available to them. Would you say there's truth to that claim?Most people talk about a communications issue, but I don't think it's a communications issue. There are two issues. One is an implementation issue, and the second is an issue of the actual substance and policy at the Treasury Department. I was the deputy secretary, but I was also the Chief Operating Officer, which meant that I was in charge of execution. The two most significant domestic things I had to execute were the American Rescue Plan, where $1.9 trillion flowed through the Treasury Department, and the Inflation Reduction Act. The challenge with execution in the government is that we don't spend a lot on our systems, on making execution as easy as possible.For example, the Advanced Child Tax Credit was intended to give people money to help with each of their children during the pandemic. What Congress called on us to do was to pay people on a monthly basis. In the IRS system, you pay your taxes mostly on an annual basis, which meant that most of our systems weren't set up to pay a monthly check to Americans. It took us a great deal of work to figure out a way to recreate a system just to do that.We've underinvested in the systems that the IRS works on. The last time we made a significant investment in the IRS's digital infrastructure was the 1960s; before we had an ATM machine, before we sent a man to the moon, before we had a personal computer. So that meant that everything was coded in a language called COBOL.So execution was quite hard in the American Rescue Plan. People were left out and felt that the government wasn't working for them. If you called the IRS, only 13% of your calls were being answered. We got that back up to 85% before we left. Ultimately, I think part of this is an execution challenge. In government we want to spend money coming up with new policies, but we don't want to pay for execution, which then means that when you get the policy passed, implementation isn't great.When Jen Pahlka was on your show, she talked about the need to focus on identifying the enablers to implementation. Direct File was one of the best examples of us taking implementation very seriously.But also, on some policy issues that mattered most to Americans, we weren't advancing the types of strategies that would've helped lower the cost of housing and lowering the cost of medicine. We did some things there, but there's clearly more that we could have done, and more we need to do going forward to demonstrate that we're fighting to bring down those costs. It's everything from permitting reform — not just at the federal level, but what can we do to incentivize it at the state and local level — to thinking about what we can do on drug costs. Why does it cost so much more to get a medicine in America than in Canada? That is something that we can solve. We've just chosen not to at the federal level.At the end of the year, we were going to take action to go after some of the middlemen in the pharmacy industry who were taking out rents and large amounts of money. It dropped out of the bill because of the negotiations between the Republican Congress and then President-elect Trump. But there are a lot of things that we can do both on implementation, which will mean that Americans feel the programs that we're passing in a more effective way, and policy solutions that we need to advance as a party that will help us as well.Kyla: Some people think Americans tend to vote against their own self-interest. How can your party message to people that these sorts of policies are really important for them?Ultimately, what I found is that most people just understand their self-interest differently, and for them, a big part of this was, “Who's fighting for me on the issues that I care most about?”From my standpoint, part of the problem we had with Direct File, which I think was an innovative solution, was that we got to implementing it so late in the administration that we didn't have the ability for it to show the impact. I'm hoping future administrations will think through how to start their implementation journey on things like Direct File sooner in the administration, when you have a great deal of political capital, so people can actually feel the impact over time.To your question, it's not just about the messaging, it's about the messenger. People tend to trust people who look like them, who come from the places they come from. When it came to the Child Tax Credit and also to Direct File, the biggest innovation wasn't the technology: the technology for Direct File has been used by the Australians, the British, and other countries for decades.The biggest innovation was us joining that technology with trusted people in communities who were going out to talk to people about those programs and building those relationships. That was something that the IRS hadn't done a great deal of. We invested a great deal in those community navigators who were helping us get people to trust the things the government was doing again, like the Child Tax Credit, like Direct File, so that they could use it.We often think that Washington is going to be able to give messages to the country that people are going to hear. But we're both in a more complicated media environment, where people are far more skeptical of things that come from people in Washington. So the best people to advocate for and celebrate the things that we're doing are people who are closer to the communities we're trying to reach. In product advertising today, more companies are looking to influencers to advertise things, rather than putting an ad on television, because people trust the people that they follow. The same is true for the things that we do in government.Santi: I've talked to colleagues of yours in the last administration who say things like, “In the White House, we did not have a good enough sense of the shot clock.” They point to various reasons, including COVID, as a reason the admin didn't do a good enough job of prioritization.Do you think that's true, that across the administration, there was a missing sense of the shot clock or a missing sense of prioritization? No, because I'm a Lakers fan. These are professionals. We're professionals. This is not our first rodeo. We know how much time is on the shot clock; we played this game. The challenge wasn't just COVID. For me at Treasury — and I think this is the coolest part of being Deputy Secretary of the Treasury — I had responsibilities domestic and international. As I'm trying to modernize the IRS, to invest all my time in making the system work better for customers and to collect more taxes from the people who owe money, Russia invades Ukraine. I had to turn a bunch of my attention to thinking about what we were going to do there. Then you have Hamas attacking Israel.There was more we should have done on the domestic end, but we have to remember that part of the presidency is: you get to do the things you want to do, but you also have to do the things you have to do. We had a lot of things we had to do that we weren't planning for which required all-of-the-administration responses.I think the most important lesson I've learned about that is that it comes down to both being focused on the things that matter, and being willing to communicate to the American people why your priorities have to change in light of things that happen in the world.But the people I'm sure you've talked to, most of them work on domestic policy alone, and they probably never have been in a National Security Council meeting, where you're thinking about the risks to the country. The president has to do both of those things. So I get how difficult it is to do that, just given where I sat at the Treasury Department.Santi: Looking back from an implementation perspective, are there things you would've done differently during your time at Treasury?The most important thing that I would've done differently was to immediately set up a permanent implementation and delivery unit in the Treasury Department. We always like to pretend like the Treasury Department is just a policy department where we make policy, we collect taxes. But in any crisis the country ever has, a great deal of responsibility — for execution or implementation of whatever the response is — falls to the Treasury Department. Think about the financial crisis, which is clearly something that's in the Treasury's domain. The vast majority of money for COVID flowed through the Treasury Department. You think about the IRA, a climate bill: the vast majority of that money flows through the Treasury Department.And Treasury doesn't have a dedicated staff that's just focused on implementation: How do we do this well? How do we make sure the right people are served? How do we make sure that we communicate this well? We did this to a degree by a team that was focused on the American Rescue Plan. But it was only focused on the American Rescue Plan. If I could start again, I would have said, “I want a permanent implementation structure within the Treasury Department of people who are cross-cutting, who only think about how we execute the policies that we pass through Congress and that we put together through an executive order. How do we do that extremely well?”Kyla: What you're talking about is very people-centric: How do we get an implementation team, and how do we make sure that the right people are doing the right jobs? Now we have DOGE, which is less people-centric. How do you reconcile what Doge is doing relative to what you would've done differently in this role that you had?As you would suspect, I wasn't excited about the fact we had lost the election, but initially I thought DOGE could be helpful with technology. I think marrying technology with people — that's the key to success for the government. We've never really been great at doing technology in the government.Part of the reason for that is a procurement process that is very slow because of how the federal acquisition rules work. What we are trying to do is prevent corruption and also waste, fraud, and abuse. But what that does is, it leads to slowness in our ability to get the technology on board that we need, and in getting the right people.I was hoping DOGE would bring in people who knew a great deal about technology and put us in a position where we could use that to build better products for the American people. I thought they would love Direct File, and that they would find ways to improve Direct File and expand it to more Americans.My view is that any American in the working class or middle class should not have to pay a company to file their taxes. We have the ability in this country, and I think Direct File was proving that. My goal, if we'd had more time, was to expand this to almost any American being able to use it. I thought they'd be able to accelerate that by bringing in the right people, but also the right technology. We were on that path before they took those two things apart.My sense is that you have to reform the way that we hire people because it's too hard to hire the right people. In some cases, you don't need some of the people you have today because technology is going to require different skills to do different things. It's easier to break something, I found, than it is to build something. I think that's what they're finding today as well.Santi: When I talk to left-of-center folks about the DOGE push, they tend to be skeptical about the idea that AI or modern technology can replace existing federal workers. I think some of that is a natural backlash to the extreme partisan coding of DOGE, and the fact that they're firing a lot of people very quickly. But what's your view? After DOGE, what kinds of roles would you like to see automated?Let me say: I disagree with the view that DOGE and technology can't replace some of the things that federal workers do today. My view is that “productivity enhancing” tech — it's not that it is going to make employees who are currently doing the job more productive. It is going to mean you need fewer employees. We have to be honest about that.Go to the IRS, for example. When I got there, we had a huge paper backlog at the IRS because, despite what most people think, millions of people still file their taxes by paper, and they send them to the IRS. And during the pandemic, the commissioner, who was then working for President Trump, decided to shut down the IRS for public health reasons — to make sure employees did not have to risk getting COVID.There were piles of paper backing up, so much so that they had filled cafeterias at the IRS facilities with huge piles of paper. The problem, of course, is that, unlike modern systems, you could not just machine-read those papers and put them into our systems. Much of that required humans to code those papers into the system by hand. There is no need in the 21st century for that to happen, so one of the things that we started to do was introduce this simple thing called scanning, where you would scan the papers — I know it sounds like a novel idea. That would help you get people's tax returns faster into the system, but also get checks out quickly, and allow us to see if people are underpaying their taxes, because we can use that data with a modern system. But over time, what would that mean? We'd need fewer people to enter the data from those forms.When we get money for the IRS from Congress, it is actually seen as revenue-raising because they expect it to bring down the debt and deficit, which is completely true. But the model Congress uses to do that is reliant on the number of full-time employees we hire. One challenge we have with the IRS — and in government systems in general — is that you don't get credit for technology investments that should improve your return on investment.So whenever we did the ROI calculations for the IRS, the Congressional Budget Office would calculate how much revenue we'd bring in, and it was always based on the number of people you had doing enforcement work that would lead to certain dollars coming in. So we got no credit for the technology investments. Which was absolutely the opposite of what we knew would be true: the more you invested in technology, the more likely you were to bring in more revenue, and you would be able to cut the cost of employees.Santi: If the CBO changed the way it scored technology improvements, would more Congresspeople be interested in funding technology?It is just a CBO issue. It's one we've tried to talk to them about over the last several years, but one where they've been unwilling to move. My view is that unlocking this will unlock greater investment in technology in a place like the IRS, because every dollar you invest in technology — I think — would earn back $10 in additional tax revenue we'd be able to collect from people who are skipping out on their taxes today. It's far more valuable to invest in that technology than to grow the number of employees working in enforcement at the IRS. You need both, but you can't say that a person is worth 5x their salary in revenue and that technology is worth 0. That makes no sense.Kyla: When we spoke about Direct File many months ago, people in my comment section were super excited and saying things like, “I just want the government to tell me how much money I owe.” When you think about the implementation of Direct File, what went right, and how do you think it has evolved?The thing that went right was that we proved that we could build something quite easily, and we built it ourselves, unlike many technology projects in government. We didn't go out and hire a bunch of consultants and contractors to do it. We did it with people at the IRS, but also with people from 18F and from GSA who worked in the government. We did it in partnership with a number of stakeholders outside the government who gave us advice, but the build was done by us.The reason that was important — and the reason it's important to build more things internally rather than hiring consulting firms or other people to build it — is that you then have the intellectual capital from building that, and that can be used to build other things. This was one product, but my view is that I want the IRS home page to one day look a lot more like the screen on your iPhone, so that you can click on the app on the IRS homepage that can help you, depending on what you need — if it's a Direct File, or if it's a tax transcript.By building Direct File internally, we were getting closer to that, and the user scores on the effectiveness of the tool and the ability to use it were through the roof. Even for a private sector company, it would've been seen as a great success. In the first year, we launched late in the filing season, mostly just to test the product, but also to build stakeholder support for it. In the limited release, 140,000 people used it. The average user said that before Direct File, it took them about 13 hours to file their taxes, and with Direct File, it took them just over an hour to file their taxes.But you also have to think about how much money the average American spends filing their taxes: about $200. That's $200 that a family making under $100,000 could invest in their kids, in paying some bills, rather than in filing their taxes.Even this year, with no advertising by the Trump administration of Direct File, we had more than 300,000 people use it. The user scores for the product were above 85%. The challenge, of course, is that instead of DOGE investing in improving the product — which was a place where you could have seen real intellectual capital go to work and make something that works for all Americans — they've decided to discontinue Direct File. [NB: There has been widespread reporting that the administration plans to discontinue Direct File. The GOP tax bill passed by the House would end Direct File if it becomes law. At the time of publication, the Direct File has not been discontinued.]The sad part is that when you think about where we are as a country, this is a tool that could both save people money, save people time, improve our ability to collect taxes, and is something that exists in almost every other developed economy. It makes no sense to me why you would end something like this rather than continue to develop it.Santi: People remember the failure of healthcare.gov, which crashed when it was rolled out all at once to everyone in the country. It was an embarrassing episode for the Obama administration, and political actors in that administration learned they had to pilot things and roll them out in phases.Is there a tension between that instinct — to test things slowly, to roll them out to a select group of users, and then to add users in following cycles — Is there a tension between that and trying to implement quickly, so that people see the benefit of the work you're doing?One of my bosses in the Obama administration was Jeff Zients, the person who was brought in to fix healthcare.gov. He relentlessly focused on execution. He always made the point that it's easy to come up with a strategy to some degree: you can figure out what the policy solution is. But the difference between good and great is how you execute against it. I think there is some tension there, but not as much as you would think.Once we were able to show that the pilot was a success, I got invited to states all over the country, like Maryland, to announce that they were joining Direct File the next year. These members of Congress wanted to do Direct File events telling people in their state, “This product that's worked so well elsewhere is coming to us next.” It gave us the ability to celebrate the success.I learned the lesson not just from Zients, but also from then-professor Elizabeth Warren, whom I worked for as chief of staff at the CFPB. One challenge we had at the CFPB was to build a complaint hotline, at that point mostly phone-operated, for people who were suffering. They said it would take us at least a year to build out all the product functions we need. We decided to take a modular approach and say, “How long would it take for us to build the system for one product? Let's try that and see how that works. We'll do a test.”It was successful, and we were able to use that to tell the story about the CFPB and what it would do, not just for mortgages, but for all these other products. We built user interest in the complaint hotline, in a way that we couldn't have if we'd waited to build the whole thing at once. While I think you're right that there is some tension between getting everyone to feel it right away and piloting; if the pilot is successful, it also gives you the opportunity to go out and sell this thing to people and say, “Here's what people who did the pilot are saying about this product.”I remember someone in Texas who was willing to do a direct-to-camera and talk about the ways that Direct File was so easy for them to use. It gets back to my point on message and messenger. Deputy Secretary Adeyemo telling you about this great thing the government did is one thing. But an American who looks like you, who's a nurse, who's a mom of two kids, telling you that this product actually worked for her: That's something that more people identify with.Healthcare.gov taught us the lesson of piloting and doing things in a modular way. This is what companies have been doing for decades. If it's worked for them, I think it can work for the government too.Santi: I'm a fan of Direct File, personally. I don't want this administration to kill it. But I was looking through some of the criticism that Direct File got: for instance, there's criticism about it rivaling the IRS Free File program, which is another IRS program that partners with nonprofits to help some folks file their taxes for free.Then there's this broader philosophical criticism: “I don't want the feds telling me how much I owe them.” The idea is that the government is incentivized to squeeze every last dollar out of you.I'm curious what you make of that, in part because I spoke recently to an American who worked on building e-government systems for Estonia. One of the things that has allowed Estonia to build cutting-edge digital systems in the government is that Estonia is a small and very high-trust society. Everybody's one degree of separation from everybody else.We're a much bigger and more diverse country. How do you think that affects the federal government's ability to build tools like Direct File?I think it affects it a lot, and it gets back to my point: not just the message but the messenger. I saw this not just with Direct File, but with the Advanced Child Tax Credit, which was intended to help kids who were living in poverty, but also families overall. What we found initially in the data was that, among families that didn't have to file taxes because they made too little, many of them were unwilling to take advantage of Direct File and the Advanced Child Tax Credit because they couldn't believe the government was doing something to just help them. I spent a lot of time with priests, pastors, and other community leaders in many of the communities where people were under-filing to try and get them to talk about this program and why it was something that they should apply for.One of the challenges we suffer from right now in America, overall, is a lack of trust in institutions. You have to really go local and try to rebuild that trust.That also speaks to taking a pilot approach that goes slower in some cases. Some of the criticism we got was, “Why don't you just fill out this form for us and then just send it to us, so that Direct File is just me pressing a button so I can pay my taxes?”Part of the challenge for us in doing that is a technology challenge: we are not there technologically. But the other problem is a trust problem. If I were to just fill out your taxes for you and send them to you, I think people, at this stage, would distrust the government and distrust the technology.Direct File had to be on a journey with people, showing people, “If I put in this information, it accurately sends me back my check.” As people develop more trust, we can also add more features to it that I think people will trust. But the key has to be: how do you earn that trust over time?We can't expect that if we put out a product that looks like something the Estonian government or Australia would put out, that people would trust it at this point. We have to realize that we are on a journey to regain the trust of the American people.The government can and will work for them, and Direct File was a part of that. We started to demonstrate that with that product because the people who used it in these communities became the spokespeople for it in a better way than I ever could be, than the Secretary or the President could be.Everyone knows that they need to pay their taxes because it's part of their responsibility living in this country. The things that make people the most upset is the fact that there are people who don't pay their taxes. We committed that we were going to go after them.The second frustration was: “Why do you make it so hard for me to pay my taxes? Why can't I get through to you on the phone line? Why do I have to pay somebody else to do my taxes?” Our goal was to solve those two problems by investing money and going after the people who just decided they weren't going to pay, but also by making it as easy as possible for you to pay your taxes and for most people, to get that tax refund as quickly as possible.But doing that was about going on a journey with people, about regaining their trust in an institution that mattered to them a great deal because 90 something-percent of the money that funds our government comes in through the IRS.Kyla: You have a piece out in Foreign Affairs called “Make Moscow Pay,” and what I found most interesting about that essay is that you said Europe needs to step it up because the United States won't. Talk through the role of Treasury in financial sanctions, and your reasons for writing this piece.People often think about the Treasury Department as doing a few things. One is working with Wall Street; another one is collecting your taxes. Most people don't think about the fact that the Treasury Department is a major part of the National Security Committee, because we have these tools called financial sections.They use the power of the dollar to try and change the behavior of foreign actors who are taking steps that aren't consistent with our national security interests. A great example of this is what we did with regard to Russia — saying that we're going to cut off Russian banks from the US financial system, which means that you can't transact in US dollars.The problem for any bank that can transact in dollars is that the backbone of most of the financial world is built on the US dollar. It increases their cost, it makes it more difficult for them to transact, and makes it harder for them to be part of the global economy, nearly impossible.And that's what we've done in lots of cases when it comes to Russia. We have financial sanction programs that touch all over the world, from Venezuela to Afghanistan. The US government, since 9/11, has used sanctions as one of its primary tools of impacting foreign policy. Some of them have gone well, some of them I think haven't gone as well, and there's a need for us to think through how we use those policies.Santi: What makes sanctions an effective tool? Positions on sanctions don't line up neatly on partisan lines. Sanctions have a mixed track record, and you'll have Republicans who say sanctions have failed, and you'll have Democrats say sanctions have been an effective tool, and vice versa.The way I think about sanctions is that they are intended to bring change, and the only way that they work is that they're part of an overarching foreign policy strategy. That type of behavior change was what we saw when Iran came to the table and wanted to negotiate a way to reduce sanctions in exchange for limits on their nuclear program. That's the type of behavior change we're trying to accomplish with sanctions, but you can't do it with sanctions alone. You need a foreign policy strategy. We didn't do it by the United States confronting Iran; we got our allies and partners to work together with us. When I came into office in 2021, Secretary Yellen asked me to do a review of our sanctions policies — what's worked, what hasn't — because it had been 20 years since the 9/11 attacks.And the most important lesson I learned was that the sanctions programs that were the most effective were the ones we did on a multilateral basis — so we did it with our friends and allies. Part of the reason for this is that while the dollar is the most dominant currency around the world, oftentimes if you can't do something in dollars, you do it in a euro, or you do it in a Japanese yen, or pound sterling.The benefit of having allies all over the world is that the dominant, convertible currencies in the world are controlled by allies and partners. When we acted together with them, we were more effective in curtailing the economic activity of our adversary, and our pressure is more likely to lead to them changing their behavior.We had to be very cautious about collateral damage. You might be targeting an individual, but by targeting that individual, you might make it harder for a company they're affiliated with to continue doing business, or for a country that they're in to get access to banking services. Let's say that you're a huge bank in America, and you're worried about sanctions risk in a small country where you do little business. Why not pull out, rather than having to put in place a huge compliance program? One of the challenges that we have is that the people who make the decisions about whether to extend sanctions don't necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about some of these economic consequences of the sanctions approach.Whenever I was around the table and we were making a decision about using weapons, there was a process that was very elaborate that ended up with something going to the president. You'd often think about kinetic force very seriously, because you were going to have to get the president to make a decision. We didn't always take that kind of rigor when it came to thinking about using our sanctions policy, but the impact on the lives of people in these countries was just as significant for their access to not only money, but to food and to the resources they needed to live.Santi: What do you make of the effectiveness of the initial sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine? I've heard mixed reviews from folks inside and outside the Biden administration.Sanctions, again, to my point, are only a tool. They've had to be part of a larger strategy, and I think those sanctions were quite effective. I think the saving grace for the Russians has been the fact that China has largely been able and willing to give them access to the things they need to continue to perpetuate.There was a choice for Ukraine, but when you think about Russia's economy today vs. Russia's economy before the sanctions were put in place, it's vastly different. Inflation in Russia still runs far higher than inflation anywhere else in the world. If you were a Russian citizen, you would feel the impacts of sanctions.The challenge, of course, is that it hasn't changed Vladimir Putin's behavior or the behavior of the Kremlin, largely because they've had access to the goods and supplies they need from China, Iran, and North Korea. But over time, it means Russia's economy is becoming less competitive. They have less access to resources; they're going to struggle.I think everyone hoped that sanctions would immediately change the calculus of the Kremlin, but we've never seen that to be the case. When sanctions are effective, they take time, because the economic consequences continue to compound over time, and they have to be part of a larger strategy for the behavior of the individual. That's why I wrote the article, because while the Kremlin and Russia are under pressure, their view is that ultimately the West is going to get tired of supporting Ukraine, financially and politically, because the economic consequences for us — while not as significant as for Moscow or for Kiev — have been quite significant, when you think about the cost of living issues in Europe.I think it's important to write this now, when it appears that Russia is stalling on negotiations, because ultimately, US financial support is waning. We just know that the Trump administration is not willing to put more money into Ukraine, so Europe is going to have to do more, at a time when their economic situation is quite complicated as well.They've got a lot to do to build up their economy and their military-industrial base. Asking them to also increase their support for Ukraine at the same time is going to be quite difficult. So using this money that Russia owes to Ukraine — because they owe them compensation at this moment — can be quite influential in helping support the Ukrainians, but also changing Russia's calculus with regard to the ability of Ukraine to sustain itself.Kyla: On CNBC about a month ago, you said if we ever have a recession over the next couple of months or so, it would be a self-inflicted one. Do you still resonate with that idea? To build on the point I was making, the economy has done quite well over the course of the first few months of the year, largely because of the strength of the consumer, where our balance sheets are still quite strong. Companies in America have done well. The biggest headwind the US economy faces has been self-inflicted by the tariffs the president has put on. Part of what I still do is talk to CEOs of companies, big and small. Small businesses feel the impact of this even more than the big businesses. What they tell me is that it's not just the tariffs and the fact that they are making it more expensive for them to get the goods that they need, but it's the uncertainty created by the off-again, on-again, nature of those tariffs that makes it impossible for them to plan for what supplies they're going to get the next quarter. How are they going to fulfill their orders? What employees are they going to need? It's having a real impact on the performance of these companies, but also their ability to hire people and plan for the future.If you go to the grocery store, you're going to start seeing — and you're starting to see already — price increases. The thing that Americans care most about is, the cost of living is just too high. You're at the grocery store, as you're shopping for your kids for the summer, you're going to see costs go up because of a self-imposed tax we've put in place. So I still do think that if we do find ourselves in a recession, it's going to be because of the tariffs we've put in place.Even if we don't enter a technical recession, what we're seeing now is that those tariffs are going to raise the cost for people when they go out to buy things. It's going to raise the cost of building homes, which is going to make it harder for people to get houses, which is ultimately going to have an impact on the economy that isn't what I think the president or anyone wants at this point.Kyla: Is there anything else we haven't asked about? I think the place where we continue, as a country, to struggle is that, given the federal system we have, many of these problems aren't just in Washington — they're in state and local governments as well. When you think about the challenges to building more housing in this country, you can't just solve it by doing things at the federal level. You have to get state and local governments unified in taking a proactive approach. Part of this has to be not just financial or regulatory from the federal government, but we have to do more things that force state and local governments to get out of the way of people being able to build more housing. I think that the conversations that you've had on your show, and the conversations we're having in government, need to move past our regular policy conversations of: “Should we do more on LIHTC? Should we try to fix NEPA?” Those, to me, are table stakes, and we're in the middle of what I'd say is a generational crisis when it comes to housing. We have to be willing to treat it like a crisis, rather than what I think we've done so far, which is take incremental steps at different levels to try and solve this. That's one thing that I wanted to make sure that I said, because I think it's the most important thing that we can do at the moment.Kyla: Absolutely. During your time there, the Treasury was doing so much with zoning reform, with financial incentives. What I really liked about our last conversation was how much you talked about how important it is that workers can live close to work. Are you optimistic that we will be able to address the problem, or do you think we are sinking into quicksand?I'd say a little bit of both, and the thing that I'm doing now is getting hyperlocal. One of the projects I'm working on in my post-administration life is I'm working with 15 churches in D.C., where they have vacant land and want to use it to build affordable housing as quickly as possible.I'm learning that even when you have the land donated for free and you're willing to work as quickly as possible, it's still quite hard because you have regulations and financial issues that often get in the way of building things. Part of what we have to do now is just launch as many natural experiments as possible to see what works.What I've learned already from this lived experience is that even cities that are trying to get out of the way and make it easier to build housing struggle because of what you all know to be true, which is that the local politics of this is quite complicated. Oftentimes, the way that you get them over the line is by creating incentives or disincentives.In the past, I talked a lot about incentives in terms of “giving people money to do things.” I'm now in favor of “not giving money to people who don't do things” — if you don't take steps to fix your zoning, some of the federal money that you regularly get is not coming to your jurisdiction. I'm going to reallocate that money to places that are doing this activity. I think we have to take those types of radical steps.It's similar to what we did with the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, where if you didn't spend your money, we could take your money back and reallocate it to people who were giving away emergency rental assistance money.That motivates people a lot — when they feel like something's going to be taken away from them. I'm of the view that we have to find more radical things that we can do to get housing built. If we don't, costs will continue to rise faster than people's incomes.Santi: Wally, I have to ask after that point you just made: did you read the paper by my colleague Chris Elmendorf on using LIHTC funds? The idea is to re-allocate those federal funds away from big, expensive cities and into other places in a state, if the cities don't commit to basic zoning reforms.I completely agree with him, and I think I would go even further than just LIHTC money. I would reallocate non-housing money as well, because from my standpoint, if you think about the most important issue for a family, it's being able to find housing that is affordable near their place of work and where their kids go to school. I said that on purpose. I didn't say “affordable housing.” I said “housing that is affordable,” because affordable housing is, in lots of ways, targeted towards a population of people who need it the most. But for even people who are middle income in this country, it crowds out their ability to pay for other things when housing costs continue to creep higher.The only way we solve that problem is if you get rid of restrictive zoning covenants and fix permitting. The natural thing that every city and state is thinking about right now is throwing more money at the problem. There's going to need to be money here, just in light of some of the headwinds, but it's going to be more costly and less effective if we don't fix the underlying issues that are making it hard to build housing where we want it.Right now in California, we're having a huge debate over what we do with infill housing in urban areas. A simple solution — you don't have to do another environmental review if one was already done in this area— is taking months to work through the California legislature, which demonstrates that we're going too slow. California's seeing an exodus of people. I just talked to a CEO who said, “I'm moving my business because the people who work for me can't afford to live in California anymore.” This is the kind of problem that you can solve. State legislatures, Congress, and executives have to get together and take some radical steps to make it easier to build housing.I appreciate what you said about what we were doing at Treasury, but from my standpoint, I wish we had done more earlier to focus on this issue. We had a lot going on, but fundamentally, the most important thing on housing is taking a step to try and build housing today, which is going to have an impact on the economy 10, 20, 30 years from now. We just have to start doing that as soon as possible.Thanks to Emma Hilbert for her transcript and audio edits. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today's Topics: 1) Trump says the Vatican is “very interested” in hosting peace talks between Russia and Ukraine https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-trump-says-vatican-very-interested-in-hosting-peace-talks-between-russia-ukraine/ 2, 3, 4) Jeff T. Jones, a retired US Air Force Intelligence Analyst on his new spiritual warfare Catholic psychological thriller fiction book “Unforeseeable.” This book is a Catholic hybrid of C. S. Lewis' “Screwtape Letters.”

Today's Topics: 1) Trump says the Vatican is “very interested” in hosting peace talks between Russia and Ukraine https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-trump-says-vatican-very-interested-in-hosting-peace-talks-between-russia-ukraine/ 2, 3, 4) Jeff T. Jones, a retired US Air Force Intelligence Analyst on his new spiritual warfare Catholic psychological thriller fiction book “Unforeseeable.” This book is a Catholic hybrid of C. S. Lewis' “Screwtape Letters.”

Actor, writer, and founder of Fellowship for Performing Arts, Max McLean will be our guest. Max is the voice behind some of the most widely heard audio versions of the Bible and has captivated audiences across the globe with his powerful stage work. He's best known for bringing to life the diabolically clever demon in The Screwtape Letters, the hit theatrical adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic satire—and now, it's coming to the Orpheum Theater for one day only: Saturday, June 7th at 4:00 p.m.

In this episode of Thinking Out Loud, we dive deep into the crisis of attention in the digital age and its profound implications for Christian witness, spiritual formation, and intellectual integrity. Are we losing our ability to think deeply, listen well, and discern truth amidst the noise? Join us as we explore how Sabbath, solitude, intentionality, and community can help reclaim a Christ-centered focus in a world of distraction. With references to Dallas Willard, Joseph Pieper, and the Screwtape Letters, this conversation equips Christians, apologists, and thoughtful believers to pursue meaningful theology, cultural analysis, and spiritual disciplines that resist the algorithm and restore the mind. Perfect for Christians seeking more than hot takes—subscribe for rich theological dialogue on faith, culture, and formation.DONATE LINK: https://toltogether.com/donate BOOK A SPEAKER: https://toltogether.com/book-a-speakerJOIN TOL CONNECT: https://toltogether.com/tol-connect TOL Connect is an online forum where TOL listeners can continue the conversation begun on the podcast.

"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to vbelieve, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors."--C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 15.

Satan desires to corrupt every aspect of a woman's life—from her relationships and friendships to her self-perception, empathy, and even her motherhood. In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm discuss this battle with Tilly Dillehay, author of Dear Hemlock. Her new book—which is modeled after C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters—offers an eye-opening exploration of the struggles women face, shedding light on how feminine virtues can mask hidden vices whenever they fall for the Devil's lies, as Eve did in the Garden. Rather than succumb to Satan's deceptions, women must conquer them with a clear-eyed commitment to God's Word.

Basic Bible Study | Matthew, Mark, Luke & John (Part 6) This is part 6 of 7 In today's podcast, join Amy and Robyn as they continue their discussion in Matthew, Mark, Luke & John. Here is a breakdown of what was discussed: - John baptizes Jesus in the Jordan River - Jesus is tempted by the devil - "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ABOUT Opening a Bible for the first time can be intimidating. Join Amy & Robyn in an easy-to-follow discussion. This Basic Bible Study is perfect for beginners & those who have never read the Bible. Look for new podcasts every Tuesday & Friday! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ BIBLE RESOURCES https://biblehub.com/ https://www.bible.com/ http://betterdaysarecoming.com/bible/pronunciation.html https://biblespeak.org/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/mybasicbiblestudy WEBSITE http://www.mybasicbiblestudy.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can contact us via e-mail or regular old snail-mail: Basic Bible Study 7797 N. 1st St. #34 Fresno, CA 93720 basicbiblestudy19@gmail.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Emily Wilson isn't afraid to call out the real enemy. After years in women's ministry and her own battles with shame, insecurity, and toxic relationship patterns, she's seen the devil's playbook up close. Inspired by C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, Emily flips the script with a bold new book written from the perspective of a senior demon training a junior one—exposing how the enemy targets women with lies about their worth, their bodies, their relationships, and their calling. In this interview, Emily shares how to stop playing defense and start fighting back—offering powerful, practical ways to trade stress for surrender and silence the voice that says, you're not enough.Emily's book: https://www.amazon.com/Sincerely-Stoneheart-Unmask-Enemys-Truth/dp/1400249724Emily's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@emwilss/featuredNEW: Join our exclusive Rose Report community! https://lilaroseshow.supercast.com - We'll have BTS footage, ad-free episodes, monthly AMA, and early access to our upcoming guests.A big thanks to our partner, EWTN, the world's leading Catholic network! Discover news, entertainment and more at https://www.ewtn.com/ Check out our Sponsors:-Cozy Earth: Better Sleep, Brighter Days - Get the highest quality sleep essentials for 40% OFF at https://cozyearth.com/lila!-Good Ranchers: https://go.goodranchers.com/lila Purchase your American Meat Delivered subscription today and get a free add-on of beef, chicken, or salmon! Use code LILA for $40 off! -We Heart Nutrition: https://www.weheartnutrition.com/ Get high quality vitamin supplements for 20% off using the code LILA. 00:00 - Intro02:02 - Emily's new book: Sincerely Stoneheart06:36 - The Deafening Silence In Our Lives09:11 - We Heart Nutrition10:21 - How Emily Chose the Devil's Temptations13:06 - How this book helps men:17:12 - Hardest letter to write?19:34 - Cozy Earth20:27 - Mothering out of confidence22:21 - Devil loves to confuse women29:14 - intro - keys are here30:50 - Good Ranchers31:52 - ‘Allergic to Depth' chapter35:43 - Easiest chapter to write?40:12 - Temptation for women to take instead of give

How do demons attack/tempt women differently than men? Is spiritual warfare different for women than it is from men? How can women be aware of how Satan and his demons might seek to influence them? A conversation with Tilly Dillehay.

Talk Back to MeThe Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis presents the interaction between demons and humans from the point of view of a senior devil in Hell's administration. The novel consists of a series of letters from one Screwtape to Wormwood, who has been assigned to an unnamed human for the purpose of winning the poor man over to the clutches of the wicked. In the 17th Chapter, our senior devil speaks on the subject of Gluttony, pointing out that he should focus not on excess, but on refinement or Delicacy. In this episode, we trace how this form of Gluttony can be found in the Gun Culture, where we so often define ourselves by what we have. For some it comes in prideful amassing of a great horde, for others, it's in knowing oh so well the current trend but viewing ourselves as thus better than it. For others, and perhaps most caricatured, are those who hide behind displayed "taste" to deceive others into thinking they are something they indeed, are not. Use Code 2025deaddrop10 for 10% off your order at obsidianarms.comThis episode has been sponsored by Obsidian Arms, a manufacturer of tools, parts and firearms, as well as operating as an OEM shop for those looking to bring excellence to the market. Their Minnesota-based shop builds and cuts parts out of U.S.-sourced materials. Their gunsmith tools, custom firearms, and capabilities can be found at www.obsidianarms.comSupport the REDACTED Culture Cast at redactedculture.locals.comSSP and boutique products at redactedllc.comFollow us on Instagram at @redactedllc

Why is propaganda and empty rhetoric so appealing to some people? In this midweek episode, Frank explains how the first of 'The Screwtape Letters' by C.S. Lewis perfectly illustrates the way demons manipulate human beings, now and throughout history. He'll also explore the recent power struggles between the Trump Administration and the lower district court judge who blocked Trump's transgender military ban. Frank will answer questions like:Why is using "jargon" instead of evidence-based arguments not good thinking?What specific tactics does C.S. Lewis say demons use to tempt humans and where do we see evidence of this happening in our culture today?Do all people have the right or privilege to serve in the military?Was Trump's decision to say transgender people are not qualified to serve in the military unconstitutional?Why is it so difficult to impeach judges, and do we really have only three branches of government?What do a lot of people get wrong about Islam?Frank also tackles some listener questions about who will be resurrected (is it only Christians?) and whether an old-earth contradicts biblical genealogies. Plus, he'll reveal details about his numerous speaking events coming up this spring—so listen closely to see if he's coming to a city near you!Resources mentioned during the episode:The ScrewTape Letters by C.S. Lewis - https://a.co/d/7F6GSTMFederal Judge Appoints Himself President - https://bit.ly/4hLAjOISeven Days that Divide the World - https://a.co/d/0VxGRz6The Case for Old-Earth Creationism (Genealogy Info) - https://bit.ly/4l0QTghSystematic Theology by Wayne Grudem - https://a.co/d/38DqgSZ

A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent by the Rev'd Dr. Matthew Colvin In Dante's Inferno, the Italian poet's lurid imagination has created a special circle of hell as a punishment for thieves: because they are sinners who did not distinguish between what was their own and what belonged to someone else, they are punished (in Dante's imagination) by a blurring of the lines distinguishing their own bodies and nature from those of something else: monstrous lizards chase them down as they run in terror, and when they catch up with them, they jump onto them, clasp them with their four legs, and fuse their lizard bodies together with their human bodies, producing a horrific human-lizard hybrid. It is one of the creepiest and most disgusting punishments in the Inferno, and when I read it, my skin crawls. A similar revulsion is evoked by parasites. My fellow American missionaries in the Philippines used to joke, whenever they came back to the United States and got a stomachache, that it was caused by their Philippine parasites becoming unhappy with American food. My wife has seen a pregnant woman cough up a five inch worm, still twitching. I could multiply examples, but you get the point: parasites are uniquely disgusting because they violate our bodies and live inside us against our will. Demon-possession is like this, except that the violation is even more severe: a malevolent and powerful spiritual entity dwelling within a human being, controlling his speech and actions, his mind and body, against his will. This sort of parasitism is subtly implied in an oddity of the language in Luke 11 :14: “And he was casting out a demon, and it was mute.” Who was mute? The gender of “it” is neutered, which matches the word for demon, daimonion. Yet the very next sentence says, “So it was, when the demon had gone out, that the mute spoke.” Do you see how the properties of the demon are the properties of the man it possesses? This should make your skin crawl. It's very evil. The sorts of frightful scenes of violence depicted in the movie The Exorcist are not actually far fetched in comparison with the actions of demon-possessed persons in the Bible: cutting themselves, breaking chains, attacking people and “prevailing against them so that they flee naked and wounded”, speaking with other voices, throwing the possessed person into fire or water. No wonder the Jews wanted to get rid of demons. One of the marks of a great rabbi was that his teachings were authenticated by miracles, including the exorcism of demons. This was a popular piece of Jewish wonder-working. Acts chapter 19 speaks of “vagabond Jewish exorcists”. The historian Josephus tells how such people operated: “I have seen a certain man of my own country, whose name was Eleazar, releasing people that were demoniacal in the presence of Vespasian, and his sons, and his captains, and the whole multitude of his soldiers. The manner of the cure was this: He put a ring that had a Foot of one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon to the nostrils of the demoniac, after which he drew out the demon through his nostrils; and when the man fell down immediately, he abjured him to return into him no more, making still mention of Solomon, and reciting the incantations which he composed. And when Eleazar would persuade and demonstrate to the spectators that he had such a power, he set a little way off a cup or basin full of water, and commanded the demon, as he went out of the man, to overturn it, and thereby to let the spectators know that he had left the man.” – Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews. By contrast with this, Jesus simply commands the unclean spirits, and they come out. There is no struggle; when demons see that Jesus has arrived, rhey normally beg for mercy before he even says anything. And it is interesting to hear the language they use. In Luke 4, “Now in the synagogue there was a man who had a spirit of an unclean demon. And he cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Let us alone! What have we to do with You, Jesus of Nazareth? Did You come to destroy us? I know who You are— the Holy One of God!”” (Luke 4:33-34) and again, in Matthew 8: “And suddenly they cried out, saying, “What have we to do with You, Jesus, You Son of God? Have You come here to torment us before the time?”” (Matthew 8:29) Before the time. These demons know that they are doomed (so their wickedness is also deliberate sin against knowledge), and what's more, they know there is a scheduled day in history when they are to be destroyed. What's surprising to them is to discover that that day has suddenly come forward and is upon them already in the person of Jesus. It is very much like the exchange between Martha of Bethany and Jesus when he comes to raise Lazarus in John 11:23: “Your brother will rise again.” “Martha said to Him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live.” The expected future resurrection — that event “at the last day” — turns out to have a human face, and he is here now, in 33 AD. So with the demons: they think that they can continue to possess people until the resurrection and judgment, unaware that in the person of Jesus, the judgment is upon them now. 33 AD. Anno Domini. Jesus, from the moment of his baptism in the Jordan river, began to announce that He was himself the fulfillment of the OT's prophecies of the coming kingdom of God. His healings and driving out demons; his parables and commandments; His baptism and transfiguration — everything spoke of His office as the Messiah, “a savior, who is Christ the Lord”. When John's disciples ask Jesus, “Are you the coming one, or do we wait for another?”, He had no need to plead his own cause and use persuasive arguments to convince them of His messiahship. His answer is “Go and tell John the things that you see and hear: “The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them.” That is to say, His actions already matched the job description that Israel knew from the prophets, especially Isaiah. His vanquishing of demons was a sign with the same meaning as the others: behold, your King. And yet we are told by the fourth gospel that Jesus “came unto His own, and His own did not receive Him.” So we are confronted with the question: Why did they refuse to believe in him? 15 But some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.” This is why the ascribing of Jesus' miracles to the devil is unforgiveable — not that it is especially worse in seriousness than, say, blaspheming against the Father, but that it removes the possibility of salvation. If you mistake the fireman for a bad guy, you're not going to let him remove you from a burning house. 16 Others, testing Him, sought from Him a sign from heaven. These people are “testing him” – the same verb used of Satan's temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, and indeed, their request for a “sign from heaven” is a renewal of Satan's suggestions that Jesus should perform a gratuitous miracle to force people to believe in Him. Let's remember that He has just cast out a demon. So they are asking for another miracle to authenticate the first miracle. What end will there be of such doubt? If miracles could compel faith, these people would have believed already. Jesus' reply has three parts. His first response is to point out how illogical it is to imagine that Satan, whose goal is to oppress human beings and subject them to demonic power, would sabotage his own work by freeing anyone from demonic power. His second argument is even more pointed, and to understand its full force we must recognize the echo of the OT and the narrative situation that echo calls up. He asks them, “If I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if I cast out demons with the finger of God (ἐν δακτύλῳ θεοῦ), surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.” This is a very direct reference to a prominent Old Testament passage, Exodus 8:17-19. It is near the beginning of the ten plagues. Already Moses has inflicted two plagues on Egypt: he has turned the water to blood, and he has brought forth frogs on the land. Amusingly enough, Pharaoh's magicians did so with their enchantments — with the result that there was even more water turned to blood, and even more slimy frogs hopping around Egypt. Pharaoh's administration kept the Israelites in bondage not only by physical whips and brutal oppression, but also by projecting a spurious aura of competence and knowledge, so that they have a wise ability to control events. We see this in our own day, when the Federal Government has so thoroughly persuaded everyone that it can save us, that when a hurricane strikes a coastal city, there are people who blame the Federal disaster relief agencies and the government for not doing more; when evil people shoot schoolchildren, the government must “do something about it”; and our diets must be dictated to us with a food pyramid based on scientific research; synthetic pharmaceuticals must be prescribed for every ailment according to the wisdom of scientists. These wonder-workers are able to put a man on tbe moon; how, then, can we doubt their wisdom. Do not even imagine that there is another way, or another truth. So it is in Egypt bedore the Exodus. As in our day, so in Egypt there was a “ fascination with wisdom, which, in addition to imitating the great regimes, represented an effort to rationalize reality, that is, to package it in manageable portions”. In our day, this wisdom is technological, statistical, scientific. In ancient Egypt it was priestly and magical. And so, even though it means more water turned to blood, and more frogs on the land, Pharaoh's magicians must by all means show that they can replicate the miracles of Moses. The wizard's duel is crucial to maintaining the supremacy of Pharaoh's regime. He has the best magicians. Anything Moses can do, they can do too. But then, something happens: Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod and struck the dust of the earth, and it became lice on man and beast…Now the magicians so worked with their enchantments to bring forth lice, but they could not. So there were lice on man and beast. Then the magicians said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God.” As one writer (W. Brueggemann) comments: “The Egyptian empire could not! The gods of Egypt could not! The scientists of the regime could not! The imperial religion was dead! The politics of oppression had failed! That is the ultimate criticism, that the assured and alleged power of the dominant culture is now shown to be fraudulent. Criticism is not carping and denouncing. It is asserting that false claims to authority and power cannot keep their promises, which they could not in the face of the free God, [the God of Moses]. It is only a matter of time until they are dead on the seashore.” Jesus' words, “The finger of God” call up in his listeners' minds the contest between Moses and the magicians of Pharaoh. Jesus' accusers are failing to recognize that He is in the position of Moses and Aaron. They and their “sons” — that is, their disciples — are in the place of the magicians of Pharaoh. By whom do they cast out demons? Oh, that's right, they don't. They cannot do what Jesus has done, so they are discredited as judges — and this in the Biblical sense of the word (think Samson, Deborah, Barak). They cannot save. By connecting his actions to Moses' miracles in the Exodus, Jesus is implying that He is the agent of a new Exodus; that the time of salvation has come. Those who oppose that salvation and ascribe His work to the devil are in the position of Pharaoh and Pharaoh's magicians: not only are they powerless to do what He does, but they are actually opposing God's salvation. Jesus' deliverance of the mute, demon-possessed man is actually an instance of that basic conflict, and a preliminary step to the ultimate conquest and final defeat of Satan. He compares himself to a violent house-robber who has defeated the strong man guarding the house; and he contrasts that image with the ineffectual efforts of others before him. A friend of mine once had bats and squirrels living in his attic. By careful use of humane traps, he eventually got rid of them, and raccoons moved in. Once that happened, he decided the time for gentleness was past, and he got his .22 and a dog. Just like that, Jesus suggests that the house of Israel has been cleansed of its idolatry, but it is now suffering something far worse: nowhere in the OT do we hear of anyone possessed by a demon. But demons are seemingly lurking everywhere in the gospels. Past cleansings of Israel have been ineffective, like a situation where seven worse demons move into a man who used to have one. Jesus' intention — for those whom he drove demons out of; for his people Israel; and ultimately for the world, is a permanent and effectual pest-removal. But notice the scenario that Jesus describes: When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are in peace. 22 But when a stronger than he comes upon him and overcomes him, he takes from him all his armor in which he trusted, and divides his spoils. 23 He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters. This is the prelude to a thorough plundering of all of Satan's dominion over this fallen world. Remember when Satan tempted Jesus? He took him up on a mountain and offered him all the kingdoms of the world if he would bow down and worship him. It is a real estate transaction: that is the significance of taking Jesus up on a mountain and showing him all the kingdoms. God does a similar thing with Abraham, telling him to look at the land of Canaan, “for all the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever.” (Genesis 13:15) Satan was offering to trade Jesus the kingdoms of the world. Jesus refused, because he does not make bargains with Satan. His intention is to defeat him, and disarm him, and take away his dominion. And the Bible shows us how that happened: “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. He laid hold of the dragon, that serpent of old, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years; and he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal on him, so that he should deceive the nations no more till the thousand years were finished. But after these things he must be released for a little while.” (Revelation 20:1-3) The Gentiles are no longer under the domination of demons. No one is worshipping Thor or Zeus or Baal anymore. And when Satan is released one last time, it is only so that he can be thrown into the lake of fire after he shows how unrepentant he is. So, with the house cleansed, what happens now? God has got rid of the demons, and He intends to dwell in this house Himself. Our gospel lesson closes with Jesus' response to a woman in the crowd who calls his mother blessed: “Blessed is the womb that bore You and the breasts which nursed you!” Mary is certainly blessed. But that blessedness was not merely a matter of giving birth to Jesus. Remember that Mary responded to the angel, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.” Mary, as a symbol of faithful Israel, submits herself to God and to His purposes. The result is that God honors her obedience by coming to dwell within her. So too with us. “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and obey it,” for God dwells with them. Now that raises one last issue. I have a number of different quotations I'm going to share with you concerning the relationship of obedience and bodily resurrection and our individuality. Some of you have read CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters? They are a series of fictitious letters in which Lewis pretends that one demon, a senior demon who has a lot of experience, is writing to a junior demon all kinds advice about how to tempt a man and lead him to Hell. C.S. Lewis said this was the most difficult of all his works to write. There was something oppressive and depressing about channeling an evil voice and writing in this style for so many pages. Well, here's what Uncle Screw tape advises his junior devil Wormword about human beings:what God wants to do with human beings. He says, “But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself--creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.” Still distinct! Remember what was so creepy about that demon possessed man in our gospel reading this morning was that he didn't seem to be himself. And the demon speaks out of him. The demon is mute, and he is mute. He's lost his distinctiveness. It's like that Dante lizard people, fused with the demon. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher, not a Christian. In fact, he was a persecutor of Christians, even though he has a reputation as a wise emperor. We happen to have his private journal Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, everything he was thinking about his spiritual life. Even though he's the wealthiest man in the world, the most powerful man in the world, the emperor of Rome, we can tell from reading what he writes in his meditations. He was terrified of dying. He was not looking forward to it, and he was desperate for any philosophical help that could give him some comfort, some assurance in the face of this terrifying fact of death that seemed inevitable. His solution to the problem was to cling to the hope that his rational soul, his rationality, his sense of reason, was divine. The body, it's going to rot; it's going to disappear. It's going to become collrupt, but the soul, the rational soul, when you die, it's going to be caught up into the divine fire and become one with God. In Stoicism, they thought that the sun is God, the divine fire that everything else that's rational in the universe is a little bit of the divine fire. It's in your soul. And so when your body dies, whoosh! — Up your soul goes and joins God. If I were to take two flames and join them together, there'd be one flame. That's the way they think about it. And so Marcus Aurelius says,  “That's not the person your mother gave birth to. And that divine fire is not part of your body that your mother gest stated and gave birth to. Then he asked his question, the mask slips for a minute and he says, “But what if you're inextricably linked to it through your sense of individuality” — meaning, what if you're really tied to your body by being an individual human being? What if that's what makes you an individual human being is that you have a body that is the center of your consciousness and your agency and you look out of your eyes from your body and you interact with other people and shake hands with them and embrace them and speak to them face to face and see them, and they see you because you have a body and they have a body. And that's what it means for you to be an individual. So if that's what it means for you to be you, is that you have a body, then it's not much comfort to think that your soul is going to be absorbed into the bigger fire of God. Then where are you? There's God, but where are you? So he says, “What if you're inextricably linked to the body through your sense of individuality?” And he he can't answer the question, so he immediately says, “That's not what we're talking about here.” “I don't want to think about that.” It's so scary. It really would feel like standing on the edge of a deep abyss. if when you die, you lose your individuality and you're not you more. Because you'll have body anymore, and you've been absorbed into God. That's not that different from what Screwtape was talking about: the demons would like to absorb you. Marcus Aurelius shies away from the full force of his own pantheism and from the horrible consequences that it has for individuality. Two more quotations. In Job chapter 19, we have those famous words of Job about resurrection. He says, “I know that my Redeemer lives and that the last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold him. I, and not another! My heart faints within me.” Job says he's going to see God. Job in his individuality and his identity is going to see God because he's going to have a body and eyeballs that look at him. One last business. On the day of Pentecost, we have some fire, but it isn't individual souls getting absorbed into God. Rather it's tongues of fire coming down from God and resting on individuals who are filled with God's Spirit, and when they are filled, do they lose their individuality? No, they start speaking, respectively, all their different languages that their hearers know from where they grew up. So when God fills us with His spirit, he doesn't rob us of our identity. He doesn't absorb us into himself, but he fills us with himself and makes us more who we are, and that is why the resurrection of the body that we confess in our creed is a great comfort because it assures us that we, each of you individually, who you are when you are raised from the dead, you “and not another” will see God and be in relationship with him. Let's pray. Heavenly Father we thank you that you've given us victory over Satan and his demons, that you have assured us that you have called us to yourself. You have given us your spirit and you desire to dwell within us and make us into a holy temple fit for your dwelling. Help us by faith to cling to Christ in whose service is perfect freedom. We pray in his name. Amen.

Aloha and welcome to The Mission North Shore's podcast! Join us as General Jeff Van Antwerp explores the importance of being present in the present. Drawing on Matthew 9, Jeff discusses Jesus' busy yet compassionate ministry, highlighting His ability to be fully present with each individual despite numerous interruptions. Jeff shares personal reflections and insights from C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Letters," emphasizing abiding in God to focus on the present and engage meaningfully with others. God bless and have a good week!

A summary of C.S. Lewis' book Screwtape Letters.  Have you ever thought, "There might be demons assigned to me"? In the same way, God has angels assigned to help us, the devil has demons assigned to us to pull us away from the Lord and what we are called to do in advancing the kingdom of God. Screwtape Letters is the conversation between two demons working to pull a new believer away from God. And it's not exactly what you think. Some of the devil's tactics are more "ordinary" than you would think. We must understand the scheme of our enemy if we are going to defeat him. 

Lent isn't just about giving things up—it's about conversion, renewal, and drawing closer to Christ. In this episode, we dive into Jesus' time in the desert (Luke 4:1-13) and what it teaches us about resisting temptation, deepening our faith, and embracing the call to holiness.

Rev. Robert Brown

In this final episode on C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, we tackle the pervasiveness, problem, and cure, of Inner Ring idolatry. Tune in to hear how the pull of the Inner Ring is illustrated in the second Inside Out movie, and to learn how to turn cliques in the church inside out. Scriptures Referenced:Luke 10:19-21 Visit PracticologyPodcast.com for more episodes.Follow the Practicology Podcast on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MandMsPodcast

Guest: Max McLeanOrganization: Fellowship for Performing ArtsPosition: Founder and Artistic DirectorEvent: The Screwtape Letters presentation in Birmingham March 2, 2025Interview Location: 2025 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in DallasWebsite: fpatheatre.com

Guest: Max McLeanOrganization: Fellowship for Performing ArtsPosition: Founder and Artistic DirectorEvent: The Screwtape Letters presentation in Birmingham March 2, 2025Interview Location: 2025 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in DallasWebsite: fpatheatre.com

In this conversation, Dr. Marlon De La Torre shares his journey of faith and ministry, emphasizing the importance of suffering in the Christian life. He discusses his new book, which connects C.S. Lewis's 'Screwtape Letters' with the Catechism, providing practical insights into spiritual warfare and temptation. The discussion highlights the relevance of Lewis's work in understanding the battle between good and evil, and the transformative power of grace in overcoming sin.All of us are faced with the daily onslaught of sin and temptation. We are all involved in a spiritual battle to keep our souls united with Christ so we can attain heaven.The Screwtape Letters and the Catechism brings together two wonderful and significant resources that can help us to grow in spiritual courage. Engaging the Catechism of the Catholic Church from a new perspective, against the backdrop of C. S. Lewis' classic The Screwtape Letters, this book will help you to recognize temptation and engage in the battle against sin. Following Lewis and the Catechism, you will learn how to use the teachings of Christ to outwit the evil one.In this book, each chapter of The Screwtape Letters is cross-referenced with the Catechism. By examining the dialogue between the demons Wormwood and Screwtape, we can apply Screwtape's lessons on temptation to our daily lives. The Catechism provides sound and reasonable explanations of the Catholic Faith, and these explanations debunk the methods of Screwtape. C.S. Lewis masterfully invites us into the diabolical world of Screwtape and Wormwood and the ever-present battle between good and evil. The Catechism, on the other hand, masterfully reveals the teachings of Jesus Christ as a living gift of the Church that shows us the love of God for his children.Buy it here from OSV - https://www.osvcatholicbookstore.com/product/the-screwtape-letters-and-the-catechism-recognizing-temptation-battling-sin-and-growing-in-spiritual-courageThanks for listening to Good Distinctions! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gooddistinctions.com

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less." C. S. Lewis may not have said those exact words (Mike misattributes the quote to him in this episode), but they certainly express what Lewis taught. In this third episode going through The Screwtape Letters, we explore what true humility is, how one goes about getting it, and how to receive a compliment. Scriptures Referenced:Php 2:1-11 Visit PracticologyPodcast.com for more episodes.Follow the Practicology Podcast on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MandMsPodcast

Today the Pugs are pleased to welcome to the show Tilly Dillehay, author of My Dear Hemlock. Tilly has taken Lewis's ingenious book, The Screwtape Letters as inspiration for her book in which Madame Hoaxrot (a female Screwtape) instructs a junior temptress named Hemlock (her Wormwood) in the fine art of leading a young woman astray. It's a fun episode, and one with many reflections on the spiritual hazards that women find tempting. We hope you enjoy the show--if "fun" and "enjoy" can be thought of as the right words for such a diabolical subject. Order My Dear Hemlock at Canon Press: https://canonpress.com/products/my-dear-hemlock Find Tilly on the Home Fires Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/home-fires/id1530704128 Support the Pugcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8 Catch our documentary ‘A Pugcast Pilgrimage: Lewis, Oxford, and Our Postmodern Age’ at https://youtu.be/7OYYuK2Y7d0

Today the Pugs are pleased to welcome to the show Tilly Dillehay, author of My Dear Hemlock. Tilly has taken Lewis's ingenious book, The Screwtape Letters as inspiration for her book in which Madame Hoaxrot (a female Screwtape) instructs a junior temptress named Hemlock (her Wormwood) in the fine art of leading a young woman astray. It's a fun episode, and one with many reflections on the spiritual hazards that women find tempting. We hope you enjoy the show--if "fun" and "enjoy" can be thought of as the right words for such a diabolical subject.Order My Dear Hemlock at Canon Press:https://canonpress.com/products/my-dear-hemlockFind Tilly on the Home Fires Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/home-fires/id1530704128Support the Pugcast on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8Catch our documentary ‘A Pugcast Pilgrimage: Lewis, Oxford, and Our Postmodern Age' athttps://youtu.be/7OYYuK2Y7d0

Today the Pugs are pleased to welcome to the show Tilly Dillehay, author of My Dear Hemlock. Tilly has taken Lewis's ingenious book, The Screwtape Letters as inspiration for her book in which Madame Hoaxrot (a female Screwtape) instructs a junior temptress named Hemlock (her Wormwood) in the fine art of leading a young woman astray. It's a fun episode, and one with many reflections on the spiritual hazards that women find tempting. We hope you enjoy the show--if "fun" and "enjoy" can be thought of as the right words for such a diabolical subject. Order My Dear Hemlock at Canon Press: https://canonpress.com/products/my-dear-hemlock Find Tilly on the Home Fires Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/home-fires/id1530704128 Support the Pugcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8 Catch our documentary ‘A Pugcast Pilgrimage: Lewis, Oxford, and Our Postmodern Age’ at https://youtu.be/7OYYuK2Y7d0

Today the Pugs are pleased to welcome to the show Tilly Dillehay, author of My Dear Hemlock. Tilly has taken Lewis's ingenious book, The Screwtape Letters as inspiration for her book in which Madame Hoaxrot (a female Screwtape) instructs a junior temptress named Hemlock (her Wormwood) in the fine art of leading a young woman astray. It's a fun episode, and one with many reflections on the spiritual hazards that women find tempting. We hope you enjoy the show--if "fun" and "enjoy" can be thought of as the right words for such a diabolical subject. Order My Dear Hemlock at Canon Press: https://canonpress.com/products/my-dear-hemlock Find Tilly on the Home Fires Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/home-fires/id1530704128 Support the Pugcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8 Catch our documentary ‘A Pugcast Pilgrimage: Lewis, Oxford, and Our Postmodern Age’ at https://youtu.be/7OYYuK2Y7d0

In this episode, K introduces Warren to their new favorite director, screenwriter, and playwright, Melvin Van Peebles by way of the musical "Don't Play us Cheap". We briefly talk about Melvin Van Peebles' amazing life, we discuss metaphorical cannibalism (it makes sense in context), and Warren learns about The Screwtape Letters. Remember folks, "If you see a devil, SMASH HIM!" Promo: One Mic Black History Help out local theatres and check out BeAnArtsHero, Arts Leaders of Color Emergency Fund, The Actor's Fund, and the Artist's Relief Tree to find out how you can help local theatres! Buy some merch at our TeePublic!  Join the Podcast Nexus (formerly Cast Junkie discord) and help support indie podcasts at https://discord.gg/ajPg3JSg6e. Follow us on Bluesky, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebadger @ToneDeafMusical for some dank theatre memes, check out the patreon at https://www.patreon.com/tonedeafmusical and visit our website, tonedeafmusical.com

Walter Strickland didn't read a book from cover to cover until he was 18 years old. Books—from that first read, The Screwtape Letters, to Strickland's latest work, Swing Low—have shaped his life. So, too, has the Black church.  Strickland, an author, educator, and pastor, joins Moore to talk about the titles that have formed their experiences as Christians and academics. They consider how slaveholders used biblical texts to defend their actions and weaponized faith against enslaved people. Strickland and Moore observe the ways that God remains faithful to his Word amid oppression and explore the phenomenon of Black worshipers leaving predominantly white churches. They discuss African American theologians, the witness of the Black church, and the five anchors that Black Christianity has contributed to the body of Christ. Resources mentioned in this episode or recommended by the guest include: Walter Strickland Swing Low, Volume 1: A History of Black Christianity in the United States by Walter Strickland Swing Low, Volume 2: An Anthology of Black Christianity in the United States by Walter Strickland The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis The Decline of African American Theology: From Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity by Thabiti M. Anyabwile “The Black Church Has Five Theological Anchors” “A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Worshipers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Teaching and Study helps for the Doctrine and Covenants 10-11 lesson in the Come Follow Me manual. This video will give you ideas and insights on how to teach Christ and Scripture Centered gospel lessons with more relevancy and power. These insights coincide with the lesson for February 10-February 16 in the Come Follow Me manual. Principles include: Vile Verbs of the Destroyer, The Great Escape, Mission Prep, and more.Link to purchase Jenga set: https://amzn.to/4jDu29KLink to purchase "The Screwtape Letters": https://amzn.to/3WzY6JyLink to purchase Lockbox: https://amzn.to/4hkZ3xJLink to purchase resettable combination lock: https://amzn.to/4hgbWci Link to "Building Demolition" Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vO05h-JKZ0 Link to "Are You Really There" Video: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/video/2023-01-0020-are-you-really-there?lang=eng Link to "Missionary Mindset" Video:https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/video/2013-06-0029-missionary-mindset?lang=eng To purchase the Doctrine and Covenants Bundle Subscription, click here:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/TeachingWithPower You can reach me by email at teachingwithpower@gmail.com Music Provided by Youtube Audio Library. Track Name: Dancing Star. https://teachingwithpower.wixsite.com/teachingwithpower  IMAGES USED:DALL-E AI images have been used in the production of some of the illustrations used in this video.  Story Illustration pictures from Bible illustrations provided by Sweet Publishing, http://sweetpublishing.com, and issued under Creative Commons 3.0 Share Alike Unported License. All other pictures are listed in the Public Domain Disclaimer: I alone am responsible for the content of these videos. The opinions in them are mine. They represent my ideas and insights and do not reflect the official position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

This podcast includes additional teaching ideas and activities for the Doctrine and Covenants 10 -11 lesson in the Come Follow Me manual. It is intended to supplement the Doctrine and Covenants 10-11 insight video and to be an additional resource specifically for teachers, parents, missionaries, or anyone preparing to teach the content of this week's Come Follow Me lesson to others.  Link to purchase Jenga set: https://amzn.to/4jDu29KLink to purchase "The Screwtape Letters": https://amzn.to/3WzY6JyLink to purchase Lockbox: https://amzn.to/4hkZ3xJLink to purchase resettable combination lock: https://amzn.to/4hgbWci Link to "Building Demolition" Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vO05h-JKZ0  Link to "Are You Really There" Video: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/video/2023-01-0020-are-you-really-there?lang=eng Link to "Missionary Mindset" Video:https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/video/2013-06-0029-missionary-mindset?lang=eng To purchase the Doctrine and Covenants Bundle Subscription, click here:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/TeachingWithPower You can reach me by email at teachingwithpower@gmail.com Music Provided by Youtube Audio Library. Track Name: Dancing Star. https://teachingwithpower.wixsite.com/teachingwithpower  IMAGES USED:DALL-E AI images have been used in the production of some of the illustrations used in this video.  Story Illustration pictures from Bible illustrations provided by Sweet Publishing, http://sweetpublishing.com, and issued under Creative Commons 3.0 Share Alike Unported License. All other pictures are listed in the Public Domain Disclaimer: I alone am responsible for the content of these videos. The opinions in them are mine. They represent my ideas and insights and do not reflect the official position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

What keeps you up at night? What thoughts play on repeat in your mind? In this episode, Brian Delamont joins us to explore how God transforms our thinking—especially when it comes to anxiety and security. Drawing from Scripture we discuss how trusting in God's care can reshape our worries and bring lasting peace. Tune in for a thoughtful conversation on seeking God's Kingdom first and allowing His truth to guard our hearts and minds. Get Out of Your Head by Jennie Allen Proverbs 12:25 The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt “Anxiety can flow from what we expose ourselves to, and it can be addressed or mitigated by what we expose ourselves to, as well.” Luke 12:22-34 “God will take care of what is in His hands. Every good father watches over his children. The Father knows what you need.” “God's Kingdom is where He rules and He reigns. It's the wonder of the garden creation and the splendor of the new city with the Lamb of God and its centerpiece and light. Think about seeing God's Kingdom in relationship to anxiety and security. When I seek His Kingdom, there is no fear in this task. It's God's Kingdom, and He rules, so I don't need to. He invites me to be part of that dominion, and the starting point for God's Kingdom coming is my heart and mind. If I give Him me, then his Kingdom will begin to be seen in me because I'll reflect it. And God knows what we need.  “Our Shepherd will provide care; therefore, I don't need to be afraid to do what He has called me to do.” “Transformation is a change in how I think.” Psalm 127:2 “God will accomplish His purposes. No amount of hard work, early mornings, late nights are going to gain a thing if God's not in it.” “Rest is one of the gifts God has given us to counter anxiety and release control.” Philippians 4:6-8 “God is offering us peace, even in persecution which is beyond a normal human response… It's God setting up a fortress of peace around your heart and your mind.” The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis Renovation of the Heart by Dallas Willard January Reflection: What am I thinking most about? What's changing our lives: Keane: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt Heather: Cordless rechargeable lamps Brian: Reflecting on what he is thinking about Weekly Spotlight: Hyperlinked Name of School We'd love to hear from you! podcast@teachbeyond.org Podcast Website: https://teachbeyond.org/podcast Learn about TeachBeyond: https://teachbeyond.org/ 

In this episode we field a question from a child: "What do angels do?" We answer (with a little help from Tim Chester): angels are God's postal service, police force, and praise choir, for the aid of every believer in Jesus Christ. (Note: We also talk about the upcoming February reading challenge. Remember to get your copy of C. S. Lewis's "The Screwtape Letters"!)Scriptures Referenced: Dan 10:10-14; 1Pet 1:12; Gen 3:24; Exod 14:19-20; 2Ki 19:35; Zech 1:10-11; 1Ki 19:5-6; Heb 1:14, 13:1-2; 2Ki6:16; Mat 26:53; Job 38:7; Ps 103:20-21; Rev 5:11-12; Heb 12:22-24 Visit PracticologyPodcast.com for more episodes.Follow the Practicology Podcast on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MandMsPodcast

(Note: This episode is from Tonight with Dr. Steve's special Thursday livestream.) The liberal media is officially melting down. They're going through a cataclysmic existential crisis as they see their entire world being dismantled every hour of every passing day, and it hasn't even been a week yet. Just think how much the world has changed in just a matter of days, and in many respects, Trump hasn't even gotten started yet. And so, it's obvious the legacy media is in a full-blown nervous breakdown. In the second part of this episode, I chat with Tilly Dillehay about culture, family, and the oppression of the devil. Tilly is a pastor's wife and homeschooling mother of four in the smallest county in Tennessee. She is the author of several bestselling Christian books and her new book My Dear Hemlock provides an imaginative twist to The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Tilly is here today to help us understand how we can shape our culture and impact future generations. Buy Tilly's Book Here! https://canonpress.com/products/my-dear-hemlock?srsltid=AfmBOorqkDORsHtlRXQfS1ydP8y9Z_G132pSycUO2KxSd6ar8OdZsWR4 -- Transform your sleep with Dream and save up to 35%! Just click https://shopbeam.com/turleytalks and use code TURLEY at checkout. Limited time offer!* Start the 24/7 Protection of Your Home and Equity Today! Go to https://www.hometitlelock.com/turleytalks* *The content presented by our partners may contain affiliate links. When you click and shop the links, Turley Talks may receive a small commission.*  -- Join my new Courageous Conservative Club and get equipped to fight back and restore foundational values.  Learn more at http://fight.turleytalks.com/join Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode.  If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and/or leave a review. FOLLOW me on X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/DrTurleyTalks Sign up for the 'New Conservative Age Rising' Email Alerts to get lots of articles on conservative trends: https://turleytalks.com/subscribe-to-our-newsletter **The use of any copyrighted material in this video is done so for educational and informational purposes only including parody, commentary, and criticism. See Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, 276 F.Supp.3d 34 (S.D.N.Y. 2017); Equals Three, LLC v. Jukin Media, Inc., 139 F. Supp. 3d 1094 (C.D. Cal. 2015). It is believed that this constitutes a "fair use" of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

Have you been experiencing a spiritual attack? In this message, Pastor Josh Husmann teaches on the life of Sampson and how the enemy will use the desires of this world to lead to spiritual destruction in your life. Bonus: For more resources on this topic, check out The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis
https://www.amazon.com/Screwtape-Letters-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652934

In this episode of the Simplified Organization podcast, Mystie Winckler sits down with author Tilly Dillehay to discuss her latest book, My Dear Hemlock. Inspired by C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, Tilly's book explores women's unique temptations through the lens of fictionalized letters between tempters.Get Tilly's latest book: https://canonpress.com/products/my-dear-hemlockTogether, they dive into the inspiration behind the project, the creative process of turning nonfiction insights into compelling fiction, and how the demon's perspective reveals hidden struggles we all face. Learn how storytelling can help us see our sins more clearly and motivate us to pursue righteousness.Whether you're a homemaker, a homeschool mom, or just looking for encouragement, this conversation offers powerful insights into how God works in and through our daily lives.Topics Covered:The inspiration behind My Dear Hemlock.How fiction can make sin and temptation more stark.The importance of self-awareness in spiritual growth.

In this episode of the Simplified Organization podcast, Mystie Winckler sits down with author Tilly Dillehay to discuss her latest book, My Dear Hemlock. Inspired by C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, Tilly's book explores women's unique temptations through the lens of fictionalized letters between tempters.Get Tilly's latest book: https://canonpress.com/products/my-dear-hemlockTogether, they dive into the inspiration behind the project, the creative process of turning nonfiction insights into compelling fiction, and how the demon's perspective reveals hidden struggles we all face. Learn how storytelling can help us see our sins more clearly and motivate us to pursue righteousness.Whether you're a homemaker, a homeschool mom, or just looking for encouragement, this conversation offers powerful insights into how God works in and through our daily lives.Topics Covered:The inspiration behind My Dear Hemlock.How fiction can make sin and temptation more stark.The importance of self-awareness in spiritual growth.

In this inaugural episode of Ezra Interviews, Dr. Michael Thiessen is joined by homemaker and author Tilly Dillehay to discuss her recent book "My Dear Hemlock," a re-imagination of C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters" for the modern woman. Episode Resources: Purchase My Dear Hemlock here: https://amzn.to/404MlM4; The WAIT is OVER!!! Pre-order your copy of the NEW updated and expanded version of Dr. Boot’s Mission of God with a brand-new study guide! Get it here: https://ezrapress.ca/products/mission-of-god-10th-anniversary-edition; UPCOMING CONFERENCES:Christ is King World Missions Conference - "Gospel Culture" | January 19-22, 2025 | San Antonio, TX: https://christisking.church/lyw;The Mission of God Conferences:U.S. – Denver | Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025 @ 8:00 - 16:00 MST@ Faith Church | Arvada, Colorado: https://www.ezrainstitute.com/mission-of-god-denver/;Faith & Medicine Conference | January 19-22, 2025 | Atlanta, GA: https://faithandmedicine.org/; REFORMCON '25 | "Out of the Ashes" | April 24-26, 2025 @ Tucson, AZ: https://reformcon.org/ Think Christianly about politics with the help of Dr. Boot’s latest book “Ruler of Kings:” https://ezrapress.ca/products/ruler-of-kings-toward-a-christian-vision-of-government; Got Questions? Would you like to hear Dr. Boot answer your questions? Let us know in the comments or reach out to us at https://www.ezrainstitute.com/connect/contact/; For Ezra’s many print resources and to join our newsletter, visit: https://ezrapress.com. Stay up-to-date with all things Ezra Institute: https://www.ezrainstitute.com;Subscribe to Ezra’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPVvQDHHrOOjziyqUaN9VoA?sub_confirmation=1;Fight Laugh Feast Network: https://pubtv.flfnetwork.com/tabs/audio/podcasts/8297;Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ezra-institute-podcast-for-cultural-reformation/id1336078503;Spotify Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dW1gDarpzdrDMLPjKYZW2?si=bee3e91ed9a54885. Wherever you find our content, please like, subscribe, rate, or review it; it truly does help.

Read between the theological lines of C.S. Lewis' classic masterpiece and religious satire, penned from the POV of a demon serving in the bureaucracy of Hell. Ben explores the wildly comic and strikingly original letters from one demon to another, as the pair seek to undermine the Christian faith and tempt man into extravagantly wicked and deplorable sins. - - - Today's Sponsor: PureTalk - Exclusive discount for our listeners at: https://www.PureTalk.com/Shapiro

This episode delves into the psychology behind New Year's resolutions, exploring the illusions of hope and the harsh reality of broken promises. We discuss the nature of human aspirations, the flaws in self-assessment, and the consequential spiral into despair when resolutions falter.• Exploration of the emotional high of New Year celebrations • Overestimation of capabilities and flawed self-assessment • The inevitability of setbacks leading to despair • The danger of equating promises with actual accomplishments • Encouragement to cultivate a mindset of gradual progress insteadThank you for journeying w/ the Saints with us!

The Dean's List with Host Dean Bowen – C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters provides a striking lens for understanding today's cultural and educational battles. From pronoun policies to constitutional rights, the erosion of truth and reason is evident. In Fairfax County schools, students challenge ideology that clashes with faith, free speech, and fairness, inspiring hope for reclaiming reason.

The holiday season is in full swing, and this week, Dr. Bryan Ardis is here to uncover some eye-opening truths about the healthcare system while sharing simple, faith-inspired tips to help you take charge of your health. Leigh Valentine joins us next to talk about her personal journey with LifeWave patches, Valentine Beauty, and how her faith fuels her passion for health advocacy. Finally, Tilly Dillehay introduces her thought-provoking book My Dear Hemlock, offering a fresh, feminine take on spiritual warfare and womanhood in the style of a "female Screwtape Letters." [1:36] Dr. Bryan Ardis on Breaking the Lies of Modern Healthcare Shemane welcomes Dr. Bryan Ardis, author of Moving Beyond the COVID-19 Lies, to discuss the hidden truths behind COVID-19, the dangers of DNA plasmids in vaccines, and the health impacts of sugar and stress. Together, they unpack how simple changes—like reducing sugar, adding laughter, and embracing natural remedies—can restore health and hope. Dr. Ardis also sheds light on future health crises, such as bird flu, and the natural solutions available to combat them. [23:13] Leigh Valentine on Faith, Beauty, and Life Wave Patches Leigh Valentine, former Miss Missouri and founder of Valentine Beauty, joins Shemane to discuss innovative approaches to wellness, including the benefits of Life Wave patches for energy, sleep, and pain management. Leigh shares her inspiring journey as a longtime advocate for President Trump and her faith-centered mission to empower others. With her non-surgical facelift kits and beauty serums, Leigh encourages viewers to embrace health and beauty as acts of self-care and faith. [34:40] Tilly Dillehay's Fresh Take on Spiritual Warfare Shemane welcomes author Tilly Dillehay to discuss her latest book, My Dear Hemlock, a feminine reimagining of The Screwtape Letters. Tilly shares the inspiration behind her work, exploring themes of motherhood, aging, and grace through the lens of spiritual warfare. She discusses how her life as a pastor's wife and homeschooling mother of four shaped the narrative and offers readers insights into combating hidden vices and embracing God's grace. Resources: Dr. Bryan Ardis –  Book: Moving Beyond the COVID-19 Lies Website: www.TheDrArdisShow.com Instagram: @thedrardisshow Leigh Valentine –  Life Wave Patches: LifeWave.com/Shemane Activate stem cells & reset your body's clock  at lifewave.com/shemane Please send product inquiries to: shemane.lifewave@gmail.com Valentine Beauty: LeighValentine.com Tilly Dillehay –  Book: My Dear Hemlock   Abundantly Well  Available for Pre - Order Now on Amazon   Sponsors   Get clean healthy water with SentryH2O Use the promo code: “HEALTHY10”   Use promo code “FREEDOM” to receive  15% off your first order at Field of Greens   Get true American made products at  switchtoamericawithshemane.com   Protect yourself with EMP Shield  Use the promo code “SHEMANE”    Activate stem cells & reset your body's clock  at lifewave.com/shemane Please send product inquiries to: shemane.lifewave@gmail.com   Watch Faith & Freedom every Sunday,  10am est on America'sVoice.News   Organic natural products to help your family thrive with  Rowe Casa Organics & use promo code “FAITH”   Purchase “My Pillow” at  mypillow.com or call 800-933-6972 Use promo code “FAITH”   Join Shemane's new programs Fit & Fabulous Start Pack Faith Fuel: 21 Day Devotion    Check out Shemane's books:  Pre-Order Shemane's New Book: ‘Abundantly Well' Shemane's new #1 Bestseller ‘Killer House' "4 Minutes to Happy" Kill It and Grill It Cookbook   Connect with Shemane: Send your questions, suggestions,  & funny pet videos to shemane.chat@gmail.com    Share your hunting photos & questions to shemane.chat@gmail.com    Watch Killer House Documentary: KillerHouse.org Get Wildly Well at shemanenugent.rocks Shemane's Social Media: Facebook: @shemane.nugent Instagram: @shemanenugent Youtube: /shemane Truth Social @Shemane