Upstream

Classical Christian educator and CIRCE Institute contributor Heidi White joins Shane at the Anselm Society’s “Imagination Redeemed” conference to explain why reading the great stories to your children can awaken them to moral truth.   ** In Show References **

The Anselm Society: www.anselmsociety.org

Circe Institute: https://www.circeinstitute.org

Foreign affairs are a new beat for the Upstream podcast, and one with a complicated relationship to worldview. The idea that ideas can affect the fortunes of nations isn’t a new one, but it is a tricky one to trace out. As I talked with Pastor Jean-Lubin Beaucejour and Darrow Miller about the plight of Haiti, I was reminded of two equal but opposite errors we all need to guard against when we start asking why this nation—and others—seem stuck in perpetual failure.

The first mistake is to approach the question as materialists. A lack of resources, money, or manpower, or opportunity are the reason Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. This is how classical Marxists approach the world, seeing in economic disparities, political revolutions, and even religion itself nothing but the consequences of material conditions and motives.

But this approach falters in cases like Haiti, a land rich in natural resources, bordered by another nation (the Dominican Republic) with a per capita income six or seven times higher, and saturated in foreign assistance, both in the form of food and billions of dollars of aid—enough since 2010 to give every man, woman, and child in Haiti almost a year’s income.

It’s been over 200 years since Haitians were slaves to the French. Undoubtedly, that legacy lives on in a thousand types of brokenness and deprivation. But it is just too simplistic to attribute the country’s woes solely to an institution that ended centuries ago. In the same way, it’s simplistic to blame Haiti’s condition on the admittedly terrible natural disasters its people have endured. Other countries, including its immediate neighbor, have weathered similar disasters. Yet they recovered. They rallied. Haiti has not.

No, this impoverished country does not lack for material means to rise from its present condition. It has been the recipient of more intensive and sustained aid than just about any other nation. And despite all this, conditions in Haiti have measurably deteriorated in the last decade. Something beyond material goods is missing.

The second mistake is to approach Haiti’s plight—and the plight of similarly impoverished nations—as merely spiritual. After my conversation with Darrow Miller in particular, I received a message from a thoughtful acquaintance who added to my understanding of Haiti’s spiritual past, and reminded me that while worldviews certainly matter, their influence is subtle, complicated, and mediated by politics and culture. Miller brought up the Bwa Kayiman Vodou ceremony that many of the Haitian people themselves look back on as their nation’s declaration of independence. You can read the Wikipedia entry on this 1791 event and marvel, as I did, at the well-documented and eerie details, including the mysterious prophetess and the drinking of a pig’s blood. It’s easy to see why so many foreign missionaries over the years, and even a large percentage of the Haitian population, believe that their nation won its independence by making a pact with the Devil.

I’m not ready to dismiss this idea as bigotry or superstition, as many secular academics do. Even so, there’s an important caution, which I think came through in my interviews, but is worth reiterating:

Believing that Haiti is under some kind of national curse for an event that happened 240 years ago is not the same as accepting that the beliefs behind that event are still crippling Haiti today.

The friend I mentioned earlier sent me an essay published by the Social Science Research Council in 2010 that made exactly this point. The author, Bertin M. Louis, a cultural anthropologist at Washington University in Saint Louis, argues that it’s simplistic and dangerous to “scapegoat” a Vodou ceremony from so long ago for modern Haiti’s disorder. He’s not writing from a spiritual perspective, and I’m sure he and I wouldn’t agree on everything, but he makes the valid point that more recent events in Haiti’s history probably have far more to do with the country’s present condition. Events like “the multimillion frac indemnity Haiti paid to France, beginning in the nineteenth century, so that France wouldn’t invade Haiti after the Haitian Revolution…the period when the Duvalier dictatorship ruled Haiti through fear and violence, while siphoning millions of dollars of taxes and international aid for itself.” Because of such abuses, Louis notes that “the percentage of the Haitian population living in extreme poverty rose from 48 percent in 1976 to 81 percent in 1985.” It was under these corrupt dictatorships, not under the original ex-slave republic, that Haiti became “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” When John Stonestreet spoke on BreakPoint on Tuesday about Haiti’s “worldview problem,” he was less concerned with long ago religious devotion than he was with what Haitians believe today, and the kind of culture those beliefs reinforce. And Vodou inarguably plays a part in shaping the Haitian worldview, forming as The Guardian put it, “the soul of the Haitian people” even to this day. As John says, “These beliefs lead to ‘a culture of bribery and corruption,’ and ‘feed an attitude of hopelessness and despair.’ When fatalism reigns in a worldview, reinforced by a seemingly unpreventable string of national bad luck, people seek merely to survive the whims of droughts, earthquakes, and floods, rather than prepare for them.”

I think this insight is the key to navigating between the twin errors of materialism and superstition when it comes to grappling with the problems Haiti faces, and when it comes to praying for that nation in an informed and meaningful way. As that friend pointed out to me, the Devil is absolutely at work in this world, but he usually attacks countries through the means of political corruption, cultural stagnation, and institutional mistrust. If there is a curse on Haiti, it has much more to do with leaders who would rather line their pockets than help their people, with gangs who would rather claim their territory than bring order to their island, and with communities stuck in cycles of dependence, than it does with who drank pig’s blood in 1791.

For me, this is also a reminder that Satan has no legitimate claim on this world, and that Jesus is already Lord of Heaven and Earth, having received “all authority” from His father (Matthew 28:18) and commissioned His people to make disciples of all nations. Jesus Himself described His calling using the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed…” (Luke 4:18).

As Christians reflect on how to help and intercede for Haiti, we should keep in mind what’s implicit in these passages, and what my guests this week on Upstream make clear: that both the tyranny of Satan and the rule of Christ come about through—and are exhibited in—material means. It’s true that “We struggle not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12), which means that materialist solutions aren’t enough. Ideas do have consequences. But if we fail to understand how spiritual causes work out through material means, we will be guilty of the over-spiritualized foolishness of the one in James 2:16 who says, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled” without caring for people’s physical needs.

God help Haiti. And God help us think wisely about how He can and will use us to answer that prayer.

Shane visits with Pastor and director of Bethesda Evangelical Mission in Haiti, Lubin Beaucejour in the first of two part special on Haiti. Pastor Lubin gives a "boots on the ground" perspective of the crisis and Haiti and helps us understand the cultural underpinnings.

In the second half of the show, Shane visits with Darrow Miller, co-founder of Disciple Nations Alliance. Darrow has written extensively on poverty, worldview, and culture. He helps identify why Haiti is in the position it is and why aid has been unable to stabilize the nation. 

No political movement has taken refuge behind as many excuses as the “pro-choice” movement. Early advocates of legal abortion dismissed unborn babies as “clumps of cells,” and “fish-like”—non-entities without moral value. When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, the majority based their justification for legal abortion on a so-called “right to privacy,” together with a now-defunct understanding of fetal viability.

Since then, pro-abortion activists and lawmakers have appealed to a patchwork of often mutually-incompatible arguments. Some have continued chasing the ever-receding line of fetal viability, even as modern medicine moves it as early as 22 weeks. Others have cited extreme and comparatively rare cases like pregnancy by rape and incest. Still others have resorted to a kind of philosophical absolutism about a woman’s “right to choose” regardless of how long she’s been pregnant. Her right trumps the right of the unborn, they insist, even up to the moment of birth.

A few have even argued that the moment of birth makes little difference. Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has famously advocated “post-birth abortions,” claiming that a newborn human has less value that an adult pig or rat. These days, it has even become popular to make arguments that have nothing to do with the value of the unborn or the rights of the mother, like overpopulation, climate change, or the quality of life a baby will supposedly have after birth.

From the outside, it looks very much as if the pro-abortion movement is a conclusion in search of justification. Those who’ve attempted to harmonize half a century of confusing and contradictory arguments for abortion seem to have settled on a bizarre bit of metaphysical hocus-pocus that goes like this: A fetus doesn’t become a baby unless and until the mother decides she wants it. Thus, we can justify the inane spectacle of Healthline.com describing what’s vacuumed out of a uterus at 12 weeks as “tissue” and what’s growing inside the uterus of a happy mother at six weeks as a “baby.” What it is depends on whether it’s wanted. This Schrodinger’s Fetus logic was on bewildering display in a recent piece by Kathleen Walsh at The Cut. Walsh is an avidly pro-abortion writer who says she has long disagreed with her pro-life mom, even though her mom’s convictions are, evidently, the reason she is around to argue. In a lengthy and frustrating transcription of one of their exchanges, Walsh demands that her mother accept this belief that a baby’s ontological status hangs on its mother’s will.

“It’s still kind of a baby,” her mother replies nervously. “Whether you want it or not, doesn’t change what it is. It’s not an ‘it.’ It’s not a blob of cells. It’s skin and heart and organs and things developing.”

“It doesn’t matter, though,” Walsh shoots back, “because if it’s in my body, it’s still part of me. It’s still something that is just mine because it’s in my body. And so I am the only one who gets to decide what whatever is growing in there is worth. It only matters in terms of what the person who is pregnant thinks about it or feels about it because before then, it’s not a person. It’s a theoretical person…I exist because you chose for me to exist. You decided that you wanted me.”

“I’m not sure that’s how life works,” her mother answers. “I don’t think I get to decide when the sun comes up or the sun goes down. I don’t get to decide whether you’re my daughter today or you’re not my daughter tomorrow. I’m pretty sure life begins when life begins.”

Like I said, the exchange is frustrating, marked as it is by the author’s shocking ingratitude for her mom’s love and self-sacrifice. But this young woman’s robotic return to the dogma that a baby is a “theoretical person” until its mother decides to actualize it is indicative of just how far the modern pro-abortion movement has strayed from objective fact. From a scientific perspective, “theoretical person” is gibberish. A baby is what a baby is, whether you think that’s a worthless clump of cells or a human being with rights. The one thing it cannot be is both at the same time—a kind of quantum being in a state of superposition. This is how people talk when their ideology slams into reality and has nowhere else to go.

Yet her mother’s patient efforts to penetrate the pro-abortion boilerplate and grab hold of something human in her daughter reminded me of (you guessed it) something C. S. Lewis wrote.

In “The Great Divorce,” souls who’ve hiked down from Heaven meet ghostly, insubstantial friends and loved ones who’ve taken the bus up from Hell. We listen in on several of these conversations, and they vary from satirical to sad to downright haunting.

The Redeemed, often with the help of angels, are appealing to the lost souls to follow them back up into the glorious country at the foothills of Paradise. But the ghosts, barely visible in that bright, solid country, are continually arguing with their hosts, accusing them of unfair treatment or hypocrisy. All are fixated on some right they think they were denied, some argument they think they won, some wrong they believe was never righted, or some virtue of theirs they believe was never rewarded. Lewis makes it clear that all these ghosts are so fixated on themselves—so blinded to the humanity of others and the mercy of God—that most can no longer love or even desire happiness. They have degraded their own humanity so badly that they’re barely there. The grass is more solid than their feet. We might accurately describe these ghosts as “theoretical people.”

I am not drawing any conclusions about the state or destiny of anyone’s soul. But I am noticing that arguments in support of abortion have become increasingly ridiculous, to the point that those who make them would rather suspend their own personhood than admit what’s right before their eyes.

At several points, Walsh insists that the fetus her mother chose to keep was not her. It was a “theoretical person,” and her mother’s decision to keep her actually made her human. She even speculates about whether her mother would have been better off had she chosen abortion. This dehumanizing ideology leads those who fully embrace it to dehumanize themselves.

It’s gut-wrenching, but it’s far from an anomaly in pro-abortion thinking. This is the end result of a movement that has run out of track, denied logic and sense, and is plowing ahead on sheer will-power and wishful thinking. This is the movement whose claims the Supreme Court will be re-examining next month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the case involving Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban. It’s far to soon to speculate on the outcome. But no case in recent memory has offered the Court such a clear opportunity to revisit the logic (or illogic) of Roe v. Wade.

In the meantime, it’s never been more important to understand the objective facts about abortion and unborn life. This week, I was pleased to welcome Dr. Tara Sander Lee of the Charlotte Lozier Institute to Upstream to explain what life is like at fifteen weeks, and what abortion even at this early stage involves. I hope you’ll listen and take to heart the realities an increasingly irrational movement seeks to obscure—not only because abortion threatens unborn lives, but because defending abortion is leaving so many questioning the value of their own lives.

Max McLean is bringing Lewis to life for a generation of theatre goers. His Fellowship for the Performing Arts has toured the country bringing C.S. Lewis from the page to the stage. 

During Covid, McLean pivoted their in-person presentations to transform one of their most popular presentations to a feature film. The Most Reluctant Convert chronicles the faith journey of C.S. Lewis. Drawing from the canon of Lewis, McLean presents how Lewis realized the need for God in the world, realized his need for a God who so loved the world, and how Lewis stepped from writing his own story to join the Great Narrator in His story.

The Most Reluctant Convert is playing in select theatres around the country today. For details on show times, and to see if theatres near you are extending the performance, visit www.cslewismovie.com

Shane welcomes Dr. Tara Sander Lee, Director of Life Sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Dr. Lee describes what a second-trimester unborn baby is like, and why the Supreme Court’s decision to review a Mississippi law that banned abortion beyond this point could change American history.

I’ve had the same exchange with perhaps half a dozen fellow Christians over the years. It goes like this: I’m talking about the numerous benefits of regular exercise, especially outdoors. I point out, following writers like John Piper, that taking care of our bodies is an essential part of spiritual, not just physical, health. We are embodied spirits, and the street between our moral state and our mental state runs two ways. On hearing this, the other Christian will cock his or her head to one side, consider for a moment, and at last say, “That’s true, the Apostle Paul does write in 1 Timothy 4:8 that “physical exercise is of some value.”

Now, I don’t want to be unfair to anyone, especially not for quoting Scripture. But the idea that we need a prooftext to tell us that exercise is beneficial strikes me as a deeply misguided view of Scripture and knowledge.

Exercise is far from the only example. Consciously or unconsciously, Christians frequently scour the Bible for warrant to accept any number of notions that should be obvious through the use of reason and common sense: eating vegetables gets grounded in Daniel 1, getting plenty of sleep and food in 1 Kings 19, having regular sex with your spouse in 1 Corinthians 7, and not committing homosexual acts is grounded in a smattering of verses throughout the Old and New Testaments.

Now, don’t misunderstand: these verses are here for a reason. Either they record sound advice given to specific recipients, convey narrative details that help us see the miraculous work of God in history, or else they make God’s judgment on certain types of physical behavior explicit. But in virtually all of these cases, the Bible’s human authors assume that what they’re saying is obvious—that they don’t need to teach you this stuff. It’s why Paul uses language like, “Does not even nature teach…” when discussing gender distinctions in worship and talks of “Abandoning the natural use…” when discussing homosexuality.

In other words, before the Apostles and Prophets told us that sleep, healthy diets, exercise, and married sex are good, they expected us to know all of this, already.

This gets to the heart of an issue I’ve noticed for years among Christians: that we seem to look at the Bible as if it were an instruction manual for all of life, or as if we have no other sources of knowledge or truth beyond special revelation. But the Bible itself denies this in places like Romans 1 and 2, where Paul teaches that the existence of God, the type of God He is, and even many of His moral standards are “understood” and “clearly seen” in creation and “written on [our] hearts” in the form of conscience. In other words, what it means to be a good human being is no secret. God didn’t hide His instruction manual for His creatures only in the Hebrew Pentateuch. Paul clearly writes that the requirements of that Law were known to Gentiles who never had the Mosaic Law, making them accountable for disobeying it.

This is arguably C. S. Lewis’ central point in “The Abolition of Man”: that objective moral truths and values are accessible to all human beings, and that knowledge of them is in fact the essential trait of the human race. No wonder Dr. Michael Ward remarked in our recent discussion on Upstream that Lewis wrote “Abolition” to call people not so much to Christianity, but to humanity. He saw scholars and educators in his time denying the objectivity of values, and knew that if this approach caught on, men and women would become virtual slaves to their (or other people’s) passions.

Of course, Lewis knew that full and inward restoration to God’s design could never happen without a miracle—without the supernatural intervention of grace from the Holy Spirit. This grace is precisely what the Bible was written to reveal, supremely in the Person of Christ. And Lewis spent most of his public career defending the tenets of that revelation.

But I wonder if, Christians in our day, like the secular thinkers in his day, have fallen into the mistake of denying the moral truths and values evident in creation—of looking to special revelation for things God has revealed in general revelation. Every time we go looking for a prooftext in Daniel or 1 Timothy to support the benefit of exercise or healthy eating, we’re doing exactly that.

But it’s more serious than just prooftexting. You see, when we treat the Bible as something it’s not, we make the moral teachings of Christianity esoteric, obscure, or eccentric. If homosexual behavior is only wrong because Paul said it in a handful of so-called “clobber passages,” then the reasoning Paul himself invokes for those prohibitions makes little sense. If there’s nothing obviously unnatural about certain behaviors—if they don’t violate a “Tao” accessible to all human beings by virtue of their humanity—then Paul is blowing smoke when he calls these things “unnatural.”

The Bible takes natural truths for granted, and builds on them. This is on purpose. And it’s one reason Christians have historically held that God’s grace is given in order to redeem and perfect fallen nature, not replace it. In the Gospel, Jesus calls us not into some superhuman life alien to the way we were created, but back to full humanity.

By prooftexting value judgments and conclusions that the Bible says are obvious from natural law, we turn God’s commands into rules without reasons. And there’s a cost to misusing Scripture this way.

Outside the Church, our prooftexts have little value, and can even be counterproductive. When we attempt to engage our cultures and influence our governments on the basis of Bible verses alone, we imply that non-Christians must become Christians just to share a society with us. Why shouldn’t they kill unborn babies, redefine the family, or perform sex change operations on kids? What’s the problem, if natural law doesn’t obviously cry out against these things? Worse, when we preach rules without reasons, we disarm God’s Law of its power to convict unbelievers of sin. Why, after all, should anyone feel guilty before God when the only thing that says they’re guilty is a book, and what they’re doing violates no plain, universal morality?

Within the Church, our abandonment of natural law has a more subtle, but no less damaging effect. I often hear complaints about how Christians have “idolized” marriage and family. Books have been written, blogs have gone viral, and sermons have been preached all warning believers against seeking a spouse and children too eagerly, and instead urging them to devote their time to the service of Christ. All this at a time when marriages and births are at a historic low inside and outside churches.

Some writers go so far as to pit the Church directly against the family, portraying the relationship as a zero-sum game in which Christ instituted a supernatural replacement family to eclipse the natural family. I’ve sat with more than one young person agonizing over whether his or her longing for a spouse is unspiritual. And on moral issues as diverse as so-called “celibate gay” identity and artificial reproductive technology, countless Christians have concluded that if the Bible does not prohibit something, it must be permitted.

In reality, this is more confusion between grace and nature, more failure to recognize that not all obvious truths are written in the pages of Scripture. Some are written in our natures and bodies. And ignoring those truths is, as Lewis might have put it, an attempt to be more spiritual than God.

My overall point is this: Christians must stop treating the Bible as something it’s not, and rediscover the natural laws and evident truths which the Bible, itself, assumes and affirms. Not everything requires a prooftext, because the Bible wasn’t written to replace creation. It was written to reveal the One who became human so He could redeem creation. We don’t need a chapter and verse to establish every moral premise any more than we need these to know that exercise is beneficial. Because as Dr. Ward observed, being fully Christian in our thinking is vital, but you can’t be fully Christian without being fully human.

The Abolition of Man is likely C.S. Lewis's most challenging work. It is dense and rich with analysis and direction. Thankfully, Dr. Michael Ward has written a companion to guide readers through Lewis's piece thought-by-thought.

Shane interviews Dr. Ward today, exploring Ward's After Humanity and explaining a few of the finer points of The Abolition of Man.

To receive a copy of Ward's After Humanity and Lewis's The Abolition of Man, visit breakpoint.org/wardstudy and make a donation to the Colson Center of any amount. We'll send you both books plus a companion video series. You will also receive an invitation to attend a Q&A session with Dr. Ward and the Colson Center. Simply visit www.breakpoint.org/wardstudy

As far as I can tell, the original quote came from an episode of “That 70s Show.” A character whose name I don’t know because I never watched it says, “Well, I’ve decided to major in philosophy.” Another character responds, “Well that’s good, because they just opened that big philosophy factory in Green Bay.”

We laugh because we immediately get the joke: a philosophy degree is economically useless and doesn’t help students produce anything of practical value. The line suggests that philosophy is an esoteric pursuit, akin to sitting around with our chin on our fist like Rodin’s Thinker, contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Only non-contributing eggheads waste time and money on such things. A worthwhile education would involve practical training in some technical skill—something that falls within the fields of, say, science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.

It’s a common attitude, especially among those who would identify themselves as politically conservative. And it’s understandable, considering the philosophies on offer at so many American universities these days—philosophies chiefly concerned with identifying power dynamics, dismantling social constructs, and amplifying degeneracy under the guise of “giving a voice to marginalized sexual minorities.” Conservative parents could be forgiven for being suspicious of modern higher education, especially the humanities, after seeing Seattle descend into garbage-strewn anarchy under the demands of 20-something ideologues. Philosophy means “the love of wisdom,” but there’s nothing lovely or wise about students being taught to despise Western civilization, their own ethnic heritage, and especially Christianity.

But those with sharp eyes and ears will notice that we haven’t gotten rid of philosophy by focusing on “practical” studies. We have, in fact, assumed one philosophy in particular that says education is all about increasing our earning potential and our future economic output. We might call this the “technocratic philosophy” of education. And it’s a very new one.

For many centuries that saw the founding of the great universities in Europe and America, education—whether primary, secondary, or postsecondary—was guided by a different philosophy that saw all human knowledge as united and purposeful, and saw learning as an act of glorifying God. If you look up at the peaks of archways in the most storied schools, you can still see traces of that philosophy, so long forgotten by most professors and students.

“Lux et Veritas”—light and truth—is the old motto of Yale. “Dominus illuminatio mea”—“The Lord is my light”—has been Oxford’s slogan for centuries. These Latin phrases harken back to a view of education as neither an effort to deconstruct civilization, nor as a means of padding resumes and securing middle-class status. In this older view, learning was about forming virtuous citizens who know to use their skills and order their affections for the good of all—to love what is true, good, and beautiful, and to hate what is false, evil, and ugly.

Indeed, the very word “university” is a relic of this view. It implies a unity of all knowledge, whether math and science or theology and literature. To have a “liberal” education today may mean learning to replace the American flag with a rainbow one and replace Christianity with Critical Theory. But the term

originally meant an education suited for a member of a free society—someone worthy and capable of self-government.

No one understood or believed in this view more than C. S. Lewis, himself a lifelong educator. He portrays the distortions of modern education again and again in his works. In “The Chronicles of Narnia,” he describes Eustace Clarence Scrubb as a boy who had read all the wrong sorts of books—those about “exports and imports” and “governments” and “grain elevators,”—but never books about dragons. The same Eustace later finds himself at an experimental school where bad behavior and bullying are studied by psychologists, rather than punished. And earlier in the series, Professor Digory Kirke is bewildered at finding that Lucy Pevensie’s siblings never learned logic from Plato. “What do they teach in these schools?” he wonders aloud.

But nowhere does Lewis more clearly articulate the wrong turn education has taken, together with his view of the purpose of education, than in “The Abolition of Man.” This week on Upstream, Bethlehem College President Joe Rigney joined me to unpack the riches in Lewis’ thought on learning. Rigney thinks the Oxford don’s views are summed up in his central image of “men without chests.”

According to Lewis, the principal purpose of education from grade school to grad school is the formation of virtuous habits in young people—a “chest” full of just sentiments that can mediate between the intellect (the “head”) and the appetites (the “belly”). In fact, using the term “humanities” to describe areas of study like philosophy is appropriate, since for Lewis, the aim of education is to produce well-functioning humans. And the mistake of removing the chest from the center of education shows up in modern education’s bad fruit: angry idealogues ruled by the demands of their bellies, and calculating technocrats ruled by the demands of their wallets.

For Dr. Rigney (and for Lewis) the task of Christian educators is to resist both of these errors, and to recover the tools and telos of an older, better kind of education. I hope you’ll listen to our conversation and dig deeper into what it means to teach the next generation not merely how to make money, but how to be free, virtuous, self-governing and truly wise. Because even though there may not be any philosophy factories, every institution of learning—whether home school, classical Christian school, or university—is a factory, of sorts, and the type of humans it turns out depends very much on its philosophy.

Shane visits with Joe Rigney, President and Associate Professor of Theology and Literature at Bethlehem College & Seminary.  Dr. Rigney has written numerous books on Lewis, including Live Like a Narnian: Christian Discipleship in Lewis's Chronicles and Lewis on the Christians Life: Becoming Truly Human in the Presence of God. Shane finds a deeper understanding of the impetus behind the educational thrust in Lewis's writing of The Abolition of Man.

This interview is part of a three-part series on Upstream where Shane is exploring The Abolition of Man and encouraging listeners to join the Colson Center in studying it this month. In October, if you make a gift of any amount to the Colson Center, we will send you a copy of The Abolition of Man and Michael Ward's guide After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. The Colson Center will also send you video introductions to each chapter of the Abolition of Man, led by Dr. Michael Ward, and you'll be invited to an exclusive Q&A session with Dr. Michael Ward that the Colson Center will host in November. For more information visit: www.breakpoint.org/wardstudy