Present Concerns Journalistic Essays

Although C.S. Lewis professed never to read newspapers and recommended doses of good literature as an antidote to news, he himself was an occasional journalist. All but two of the nineteen essays in this volume, previously uncollected, first appeared in newspapers or magazines. They have in common Lewis’s characteristic sanity and persuasiveness. Those written between 1940 and 1945 reflect largely on questions generated by the war: democratic values, the need for an updated chivarly, and the cynicism of the modern soldier. Other essays examine the threats to educational and spiritual fulfillment; while “Sex in Literature” and “On Living in the Atomic Age” address literary censorship and our very survival, issues debated even more passionately today than in Lewis’s lifetime.