I am doing the same lecture again this Fall, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to finally read this famous book. In a lecture for my “ Myths of Love, Sex and Marriage” class in Fall 2010 I kept stumbling across references to this book in footnotes and weblinks. The Four Loves is also a book that I haven’t even pretended to read before. His Allegory of Love (1936) was the most popular of his work in literary criticism and was a kind of break-out book for him. Of his popular nonfiction, this is the book that is closest to his field of study. So I post again of my first experience reading The Four Loves back in 2011. Just like the preacher who preached the same sermon several times defended his repetition by the lives of his congregation, so my church, evangelicals, needs to root our public lives in transformative love. I think of North American Christians read this book faithfully and tried to live in the world this way, our entire culture would be transformed. But I am also more and more keenly aware of how prophetic this book is, calling us to a certain character of love and showing where that can go wrong. I am now far more aware of the flaws in this book, as well as some of the material that horrifies people. I have read The Four Loves a few times since I first made this post back in 2012.
This relatively uncontroversial review is my 5th most popular C.S. This might be an idea or book that is now relevant again, or a concept I’d like to think about more, or even “an oldie but a goodie”that I think needs a bit of spin time.
This year I introduced an occasional feature I call “ Throwback Thursday.” This is where I find a blog post from the past–raiding either my own vault or someone else’s–and throw it back out into the digital world.
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