As we have known for some time, the housing bubble’s enablers from the financial world somehow missed the chapter about intoxication. So now we are deep in the blame game. Mortgage brokers, all sorts of banks (retail, commercial, and investment), rating agencies, property flippers, and regulators have all made the list. Perhaps somebody should go upstream in a search for the real culprit. In the meantime, at the global level, central bankers work on liquidity; earlier liquidity mistakes should give us pause. And at the personal level we are learning once again a very old lesson: there is no free lunch.

So let it be for his ideas that we honor Jefferson, above all else. And for the cause of human freedom and human dignity that he so eloquently championed. His failings may weigh against the man, but not against the cause for which he labored so heroically. That should be a lesson to us today. Like Jefferson, we all are carriers of purposes far larger than we know. Purposes whose full realization cannot be achieved in our lifetime, or even be fully understood by us, but which we are called to carry forward as faithfully as we can—as charges to keep.

Characteristically, Lewis offered an explanation much closer to home. “They forget that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works,” he wrote. “‘My heart’—I need no other’s—‘showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.’”

The book’s themes—the bond between faith and reason, the lust to dominate, the immeasurable worth of every human soul—not only invite our attention: Their recovery may be the tonic our own spiritually troubled age most requires.

Well, I told him that if we could secure the rights to the novel about how a senior demon instructs a bumbling apprentice demon on the fine art of tempting a young human into perdition, we would give it a go. We did, and now to date we have had two successful runs in New York City and one in Washington D.C.

Screwtape is a plum role—part Noel Coward . . . part Hannibal Lecter . . . part Iago. C. S. Lewis described the process of writing Screwtape as difficult, but playing him is a lot of fun. I remember hearing Malcolm Muggeridge speak of “fictional good” as dull and boring while “fictional evil” is fascinating and engaging. He also was clear to say that in life it is quite the other way around. Perhaps that is one reason film depicts so much violence and evil. 

Do any of us remember the names of the last few “American idols”?

It’s the way of idols, isn’t it, that they must be regularly reinforced, added to, or replaced because they don’t have sufficient staying-power to satisfy the cultural hunger of their devotees. The idols we exalt are as fleeting as the standards we use to select and anoint them. And what is true for these “American idols” is true for much of contemporary culture. Little in the way of abiding beauty, goodness, or truth has emerged from America’s cultural forges in recent years. A few groups and stars, an occasional writer, and perhaps a handful of works of art or architecture manage to extend their time in the spotlight to something just short of a generation, but then they, too, go the way of the “American idols” as the fickle tastes of a mundane age, tethered to nothing more than momentary titillation—measured in terms of willingness to part with a buck—go searching like a snake’s tongue for the next meal.

Surely there is a better way to do culture?

In a post–9/11 world, that’s how we must design and build the skyscrapers of the future: capable of withstanding acts of God and man. Here in California, earthquake-testing our tall buildings has been a mandated practice for decades, and in other regions of the country, formalized tests for withstanding high wind and rain are not only well-known, but are a required part of architectural education.