Thus, with the help of some Ruby scripting, HTML, and CSS, I present the fruit of my (and my computer’s) efforts: a complete list of all of C. S. Lewis’s essays tagged with the collections in which they appear. Copious thanks to Bowen Simmons for his Amazon (US) reviews listing the table of contents for many of the books and suggesting shortcuts to owning all the essays.

As you can see from the following table, and as Simmons suggests, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces is the first book to own. If you can’t find it in the US, try amazon.co.uk. This contains a large proportion of the pieces and nearly all of those not specifically dedicated to academic literary criticism. For many readers interested primarily in Lewis’s Christian writings—as opposed to those dedicated to literary criticism—this volume may be all you need. If you’re after his academic literary essays, Selected Literary Essays and Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature fill in the bulk of this work.

The collections mentioned in this table are:

• Essay Collection and Other Poems, HarperCollins, 2000
• Selected Literary Essays, Cambridge, 1979
• God in the Dock, Eerdmans, 1972
• Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge, 1998
• Rehabilitations and other Essays, [publisher?], 1939
• Christian Reflections, Eerdmans, 1994
• Of Other Worlds, Harcourt Brace, 1966
• They Asked for a Paper, Geoffrey Bles, 1962
• The World’s Last Night, Harcourt Brace, 1960
• The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, Eerdmans, 1965

Please let me know of any errors you may find.

They hear us talking about what we should and shouldn’t do.

Now for a while, these conversations make sense to the robots. When we talk about whether we should buy the cheap, old bread instead of the expensive, fresh bread, they recognize this as a fundamentally economic discussion, having to do with commodities such as money, flavor, and health. Other “should” questions strike them the same way.

• “Should we take the safer road or the shorter road?”
• “Should we pay more for the more durable item or pay less for the flimsy item?”
• “Should we invest in this risky but potentially rewarding company?”

“Economics!” they say to each other, and they become convinced that we are, at least, intelligent beings.

Then they encounter other questions that are more confusing to them.

• “Should I become his friend, knowing that he has a lot of influence, or should I avoid him because he’s kind of a jerk?”
• “Should I make the first call or should I wait until he calls?”
• “Should I ask beautiful Tabitha on a date, knowing that she’ll probably reject me, or homely Alice, knowing that she’ll probably accept me?”

They puzzle over these questions for a while. But the robots eventually realize that although these questions are relational (which the robots are not real big on), the questions are still basically economic in nature.

An economic question deals fundamentally with concerns about what will bring the most benefit at the least cost. The “benefits” and “costs” might be financial, emotional, sexual, reputational, or of any of various other currencies. But it’s fundamentally a tactical, pragmatic, calculable (albeit often in vague or uncertain ways), cost-benefit question.

The robots become convinced that we are essentially sophisticated ants. We are concerned, like all creatures are, with getting the most bang for buck. But we are social animals, concerned about interpersonal commodities such as reputation, affection, and loyalty. Although the robots aren’t concerned with these things themselves—their own interests being more in the line of batteries, oil, steam pressure valves, and copper filaments—they recognize that our talk about these things are, for us, economic discussions.

But then the robots come across a completely different use of “should” that leaves them scratching their titanium scalps. They hear statements like these.

• “I know you’ll never get caught, but you still shouldn’t have stolen that $100,000.”
• “I should keep my promise even though it means losing my job.”
• “Should we keep the bonus for ourselves or should we distribute it among the people who made the product successful?”
• “I gave that little girl my last piece of bread. I suppose I’ll starve now, but I knew it was what I should do.”

Now these statements and questions really befuddle the robots. They recognize that there is an economic dimension to the questions, in that costs and benefits are involved to some extent. The puzzling thing is that the force of the “should” in each statement is often opposed to the economic benefit—exactly the opposite of what you’d expect. Humans, they find, often say they “should” do something not because it’s economically beneficial, but for some other reason. And the robots can’t put their creaking fingers on what that reason is.

As we look at the human race from the perspective of these mystified robots, we come into contact with the study of ethics. This is no authoritative definition, but a decent way to approach the study of ethics is is to see it as the investigation of why people say “should” and “should not” in a non-economic, and yet somehow obligatory, way.

Something else that intrigues the robots is that people often get really upset about these particular kinds of “should” and “should not” questions—even more so (indeed much more so) than they do about the economic questions. The humans seem to have the sense that if a person does a “should” thing, that person deserves praise, even or especially if that action brings no economic benefit. If the feeling of “should” associated with an action is particularly intense and the cost of doing it is particularly high, people will even call that person a “hero”. There is arguably no higher form of praise. Likewise, a person who does a “shouldn’t” thing hasn’t merely done something sub-optimal, costly, or risky. The robots could understand that. What they can’t understand is that these people are often seen as contemptible, loathsome, and repugnant, sometimes even to themselves. Other people sneer at them like they’d sneer at a mold-blackened potato. These particular kinds of “shoulds” and “should nots”—the ethical kinds—invoke intense emotion in human beings.

The robots ask, “What kind of ants are these?”

Ethical statements have an emotional nuance as well as an economic nuance. They carry a sense of obligation, describing what ought or ought not to be.

But it gets even more surprising. Despite these strong emotional and intuitive elements, there is also a rational, logical aspect to ethical statements. People argue rationally about what they ought to do or be. They try to convince each other using reasons, deductions, analogies, and inferences. So although ethics involves emotions, it also involves reason and logic. This confluence of emotion, intuition, and logic—all in the context of obligation—almost makes the robots’ brains short-circuit.

The philosophical study of ethics, then, asks the question of why people talk and feel this way about certain kinds of people and and certain types of actions. Students of ethics not only observe the talking—they also participate in it, asking what kinds of people and actions are properly worthy of being “should” things or “shouldn’t” things.

Since Diablo III‘s release, Blizzard has devoted much of its internal technology effort to the development of a network-free single-player experience, a technology it refers to as LocalServer™. Insiders report that progress has been slow but steady. “Most of the GPU code now runs purely on the client machine,” said a source who wished to remain nameless. “About half of the physics calculations are still server-side, but pathfinding is purely client-side and most of the user interface—buttons, sliders and whatnot—never touch the server.” Blizzard’s public stance on when the technology might be available is their usual “when it’s done.” Our sources tell us, however, that despite some setbacks, the process of de-networking the game code is making significant strides. Best estimates say that LocalServer™ should be ready in mid-2015.

Electronic Arts is banking on an earlier release for the technology, however. “It’s no secret that we’ve had difficulty making the single-player experience of SimCity truly single-player,” admitted Chuck Upton, EA’s newly-appointed Technical Advancement Research Director. “It has taken some soul-searching to admit that we needed help with the technology to remove the game’s network dependencies. But we feel that what Blizzard has been working on is just the thing we need, and we’re willing to put up our hands and accept some help on this one.”

The question is one of time. Players who regret purchasing SimCity as well as players who haven’t purchased it yet are anxiously awaiting a solution. For them, Blizzard’s mid-2015 release date for LocalServer™ may come too late. “Uh, yeah—no, that’s stupid,” said player Andreas Bilestode when told about EA’s intent. “In a week or two everyone will have moved on from SimCity to some other amusing trifle, probably published by Rovio or Chillingo. Nobody’s waiting a whole month much less a whole coupla years or whatever. EA needs to strip out the network code today, patch the game tomorrow, and be done with it.”

EA TARD Chuck Upton laughs at this suggestion. “How naive—technically speaking, I mean,” he explains. “You don’t just ‘strip out’ network code. This is the latest in cutting-edge networkless game code. People have earned their doctorates in mathematics working on the problem of removing these dependencies. You don’t just ‘strip it out’.” He laughs heartily.

Independent gaming consultant James Thomas Gelatinous Cube agrees. “Two years ago, the very idea of a game running without a network connection was virtually unheard of outside of a few niche gaming platforms. What Blizzard is working on is absolutely state-of-the-art stuff.” When asked whether he thought that 2015 was a realistic date for the release of a new wave of server-free games, Mr. Cube rolls his eyes. “EA should count themselves lucky if they can run their games server-free by 2015. I’ll feel lucky if I’m driving a cold fusion-powered car by then, and EA should feel lucky if their games can run without an Internet connection. This is difficult stuff.”

But it’s failing. It is selling “pitifully, pitifully poorly,” according to Cas, one of its developers.

Cas goes on to explain that none of Puppy’s recent games have been profitable except for Titan Attacks, which took seven years to break even. This despite brilliant visuals and—as far as I can see—delightful gameplay.

And yet Puppy’s struggles are hardly unusual. In this era when every unemployed software developer or Mom & Pop outfit with a half-baked game idea is making a casual game—the results usually having only a fraction of the beauty and brilliance of  a game like Ultratron—skillful, dedicated game developers are struggling to get their creations noticed, paid for, and profitable.

I don’t have a solution, but I do have sympathy. Ultratron’s struggles in the marketplace make me sincerely sad—sad like you might feel if you discovered, in some alternative version of the ’60s, that the Beatles were still languishing in a Liverpool lounge in 1969, dodging beer bottles while singing “Hey Jude” to a few drunks teetering around the bar.

Cas, I feel your pain. Game development can be awful. If the actual act of developing games wasn’t so darned fun, the response of customers (or, often, the lack of response) would make it oh so very not worth it.

I got my own start in the AAA games industry working on big titles like Ultima Online, Brothers in Arms, and others you might just recognize. Between the games you might recognize were many you wouldn’t because they got cancelled or they bombed. Even the games that did well were only so satisfying to work on because the projects were huge and each individual developer was a small cog in the machine.

Since 2005 I’ve been working on casual games like what you guys at Puppy do—mostly Flash and iOS games. Some have done very well, I’m thankful to say. But it always seems like the ones I care most about are the ones that customers most shrug their shoulders at. I point at the game and say, “But look at that AI… look at those colors… look at that particle explosion! I spent five hours on that explosion and it is a perfect specimen of its species.” But the customers have stopped listening by now and are giggling along with a game that makes farting noises when you mash a red gradient rectangle with your nose.

And the fact that we’re working on small teams makes the pain worse. This isn’t just some corporate production here—this is our game that we put our sweat and blood and brain and cash into—these people right here that I’m pointing to with my fingers. We’re not some faceless multinational conglomerate churning out pixels and code for The Man. I skipped reading my kid story time last night in order to give customers the joystick support they’re so desperate for (I’m told). I’ve got skin in this game.

So you feel it when your games get overlooked in much the same way that a fellow who offers flowers to a girl only to see them tossed aside because she’s more interested in the tongue depressor that some other fellow has given her feels. The grammar of that sentence may take some time to work through. Sorry.

So Cas, this may be embarrassing for you, but I’m about to do something very American. Brace for it—here it comes. I’m putting my arm around your shoulder, Cas, as one developer to another, and I’m saying: “I feel ya brother.” Seriously. Ultratron deserves better than this. It deserves to sell a hundred million copies. Possibly two hundred million. It deserves to become more popular than Angry Birds, until little kids are cuddling up to Rocket Pet stuffed toys in their beds at night, sleeping on Ultratron sheets and brushing their teeth with Tooth Defense Drone toothpaste (“Blasts away cavities!”) and so on. It stinks that the game isn’t doing better, and I can’t explain why. Game development stinks sometimes.

My aim will be to show that the reasons—the doubts, the discoveries, the emotions—that led you to set aside faith as you came of age were, although probably reasonable, not ultimately correct. You will see in what I’m about to argue that the reasons that persuaded you then should not persuade you now; that in fact the intellectual insights that moved you away from faith as you came of age were tainted with a kind of naivety, and that the more sophisticated reasoning and greater experience available to a more mature adult not only warrants a return to faith, but compels it.

My basic premise is this. Over-reaction of a certain kind is a basic human epistemological tendency. This tendency, along with other overwhelming features of young adulthood—a growing sense of autonomy, a general pushing aside of parental authority, greater exposure to moral ambiguity in oneself and one’s surroundings, and exposure to an awe-inspiring array of new information and ideas—conspires to lead a young person to cast aside their faith. This casting aside feels reasoned and well-motivated, but is in fact irrational and unwarranted.

Now let me explain.

As a child you may have believed in Noah’s ark. When you heard in Sunday School that Noah, having been warned by God of a coming flood, built a gigantic wooden ship and then brought into it two of every species of animal on the earth, you pictured this scene vividly in your mind, enjoyed it, and accepted it. Nothing in your young experience cautioned you that the story—or your vision of it—might be fictitious. It seemed plausible enough; after all, how many species could you name at that age? And it was a compelling image. What child doesn’t like animals or dramatic tales of impending destruction?

At that early age you built, under the guidance of your elders, a model of how to read and process biblical stories. It was an unsophisticated model; naturally it had to be: you were a child. You took whatever words you read from the page, imagined the scene as well as you could based on your own understanding of language and the world and on the hints and suggestions of your guides. You formed the best image you could—the best mental “movie”—and took this to be both (1) what the Bible said and (2) a true story about something that happened in your world.

All of this was quite innocent. You were innocent in making the best interpretation that you could. Even your guides were innocent, or largely so. In fact, your guides may themselves have had a much more mature understanding of the story than they communicated. How can an adult impel their mature insights into a child? Accuracy, or plausibility, are not always the highest goals. It was good that people told you a good story, and good that you absorbed it as best you could.

But then one day your youthful interpretation fell on hard times. Perhaps in junior high, or high school, or college, someone pointed out to you that your image of the story didn’t jive. There are something like nine million species of animal on this earth; how could two of each fit onto a ship of any size? If the whole earth flooded something like seven thousand years ago, where is the geological evidence? And there’s a moral problem. The climax of the story comes with God’s eradication of life on the earth. In childhood God’s judgment may have seemed fair to you (even if scary). Children are often more ethically absolute than their older counterparts. But perhaps this judgment came to seem too harsh, too hateful, too indiscriminate. And so, on the basis of some new insights, you began to question the truthfulness of biblical stories.

And yet there is already an error in logic here—the error of youth rather than childhood. Do you see it now? The error lies in your identification of your interpretation of the biblical message with the actual biblical message. Because you had received this interpretation—this mental movie—so young and had held it for so long, you assumed that your interpretation was the biblical story. In fact your movie may have emblazoned so deeply into you so early in life, that even now you can’t quite bring yourself to see it as distinct from the actual biblical words. But it is distinct—as every interpretation is distinct from every message.

And so you began to tell yourself that you were doubting the accuracy of the Bible when in fact you were doubting the accuracy of your interpretation.

If it had only been the Noah’s ark story, your faith might have been saved. But then the seven days of creation described in Genesis chapter 1 ran afoul of one professor’s calculation of the age of the earth and another’s awe-inspiring account of Evolution. Now your hometown views were in real trouble. How could you, a freckle-faced yokel (feel free adjust that description for fit) defend your mental movie of a rapidly-ripening earth presided over by a robe-billowing deity against such charming, learned authorities? (Two syllables on “learned” there—very sophisticated.) Perhaps your childhood faith put up a fight for a while—in your own head if not in your speech—but eventually you had to concede.

Only you didn’t have to concede. Again, you made an error then that age, growing humility, and reflection may yet enable you to reverse.

There were two problems with your concession to your professors’ claims.

The first we have already touched on. When you rejected Genesis 1 as a reliable description of the beginnings of our world, you did not in fact reject Genesis 1, but your own movie based on the book. By now you surely see that your movie was hardly the only possible interpretation. Various people have various views on what Genesis 1 describes. Presumably there is some “original interpretation”—the movie that the original author had in mind, whether we imagine the author as Moses or as God or as some editor(s) or some combination of the three. It is possible that the original interpretation really does represent truth about how the world was created—for example, that the progress of creation could be usefully divided into six stages (“days”), that the simpler plants, fish, and birds came about before the more complex land animals and humans, that the creation is in some sense fundamentally good, and so on. It is possible that the words of Gen 1 express the truth; and if so, it is likely that as children we were unable to reform the correct movie from the correct words. Therefore our rejection of “the Bible” was a sensible rejection of our understanding of the Bible, but an unreasonable, premature, and frankly self-important rejection of the biblical text itself. Self-important because we, in our youthful hubris, assumed that our perspective was the only perspective.

The second reason you should not have conceded so easily to your professors is that their own view was not as certain as they stated or implied. I’m not saying that the theory of Evolution is wrong or that the world is really just a few thousand years old—I’m not rejecting scientific models out of hand. But the strength of these views is certainly not as great as professors of science tend to express (or evidently believe), and the whole field of knowledge—not just religion—is far more open for inquiry and doubt than the scientific culture tends to portray.

Perhaps I need to defend that assertion. In the ordinary scientific account, everything that exists is material. Energy, particles, waves, forces—these are the only things and there is nothing else. There is no spirit and therefore no afterlife or angels or gods. There is nothing supernatural, only the natural—that which we can observe. The standard of all truth must be empirical: seeing is believing.

This is the materialist position. It forms the underlying presupposition by which most science and scientific education operates. It is the aspect of science most directly opposed to the idea of God, and the aspect that is most aggressively deployed to make religious believers feel that their ideas are wrong or even silly.

The trouble with materialism is that it is not only observably false, but it is patently, glaringly false. By two separate arguments.

First, on what basis should we argue that materialism is true? More simply: why should you believe it? Well, by its own lights, observation is the only standard of truth; that is, you believe something when you see it. But on what observation could I ever come to believe in materialism? What could you show me—empirically—to convince me that materialism is correct?

Consider carefully what the challenge here is. In order for me to believe on the basis of observation that the only things that exists are matter, you must somehow show me the total absence of non-matter. You must take me to the edge, as it were, of matter, have me look over the precipice and observe, “Yes, I see now what you mean. There is nothing else here but matter.” But there is no such edge, literally or figuratively. There is no way that you can show me—or yourself, for that matter—the absence of non-matter. Said another way, there is no way in which you can show me the “completeness” or total adequacy of matter, such that the possibility of non-matter, or compelling rationales for its existence, would be forever obliterated. Indeed, in a moment I will reverse the argument and show that far from being wholly adequate, matter is indeed patently inadequate to explain what we commonly observe everyday; so that it is not non-matter, but matter that is in greater need of proof.

I suspect and fear that the rise of materialism in the last 200 years is a sad case of the simple error of mistaking a premise for a conclusion. Scientific investigation quite rightly (in most cases) makes a materialistic assumption. The experiment assumes for the sake of simplicity that the only things relevant to the experiment are material particles and whatnot. The experimenter doesn’t really believe that nothing but matter exists, but in order to focus on learning the principles by which matter behaves, the experimenter takes it as an assumption that nothing else is present to modify the results. This is sensible.

The trouble is that with time, and with wishfulness, and with the deterioration of insight that can happen when an idea is passed from teacher to student on down through the generations, this useful assumption came to be seen as more than an assumption. It came to be seen as truth—as arguable, as convincing, as established. The materialistic assumption was so powerful and useful in the investigation of physical phenomena that it came to be seen as the only lens by which all reality should be viewed. It’s the classic error: when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. And so scientists who rightly used this perspective to do their work came to use it as their perspective on everything. Tragic.

But of course, when you are young and an older, brilliant, charming, respected professor declares to you that nothing exists but particles and fields and waves, you are not prepared to answer him. Even if you were, he controls the floor—would you challenge him on his own turf? Certainly you’re not prepared at that age to see that materialism is not only questionable, nor merely incorrect, but tragically wrong. But perhaps with age and reflection you come to see him as less intimidating—less unquestionable—and other arguments begin to show their merit.

The other reason that materialism must necessarily be false is that you clearly, unavoidably, necessarily are experiencing something non-material right at this moment. That something is your consciousness, and it is utterly inexplicable in terms of materialism. Without belaboring this point—for the literature on the subject is vast—let me highlight the most interesting insights.

Your consciousness, of course, is what enables you to perceive the things around you from the perspective of a single, personal identity. You are you. You experience things. You are aware of your own thoughts, what your eyes see, what your skin feels. Although your consciousness is clearly connected somehow with material things (like your eyes and skin), it is not itself, in any way, material. It does not seem to be constituted by material. It does not seem to share the properties of matter.

Nothing in material science explains the phenomenon of experience, for example. There is no “consciousness particle”—some elementary particle that produces or constitutes consciousness. Particles have mass and spin and attraction and repulsion—at no point does awareness enter into it. No individual particle has consciousness, so far as we are aware, and even if they did, the result would be a mass of little “I’s”, rather than the single “I” that you experience. This singleness of consciousness—the sense that you are one “I” despite being attached to a body made of trillions of particles—is one of its most mystifying features.

There’s also the question of why? If we assume that the universe was created by accident, with no personal intent behind it, we are confronted with a series of intractable conundrums. If the universe is a vast machine, launched blindly down the years into the present, why has it produced these living, conscious creatures? It’s easy to imagine a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing exists. After all, the universe doesn’t have to be here. Why is there something here rather than nothing? And then, it’s easy to imagine a universe that is pure machine—all planets and orbiting and clockwork, but no life. And yet this universe had just those properties needed to produce life. Why? Why not some lifeless universe?

And not just any life. Life, at its essence, might be nothing more than highly complex molecular interactions—just one step removed from “clockwork.” And it’s easy to imagine a universe that evolves from large-scale clockwork to fine-scale cells and organisms, without any implication of consciousness. And yet this universe, incredibly, up and decided to award to certain entities with direct conscious experience.

And note here—though it’s difficult to wrap one’s mind around it—that in the absence of minds, no concept of “entities” would exist. A rabbit hopping through the forest would simply be one complex of physically interacting molecules (the rabbit) passing a mess of other complex, interacting molecules (the trees). Without a conscious mind around to see it, there would be no rabbit and no trees—only the clockwork, as it were. Thus the presence of consciousness in the universe not only puts awareness and persons into the world, but imparts them with the ability to recognize other things—first their own bodies, but then also rabbits and planets and stars—to identify them not merely as coagulations of molecules but as coherent, distinct entities. Is it really likely that this remarkable result burst forth from nothing by mere accident? Why should this particular kind of universe—one resulting in complex life and a mystifying personal consciousness—have come about rather than some simpler one? Is it really so clear that, as your professors taught you, the only entities that exist are material, when the ability to recognize “entities” at all is a function of non-material minds?

So far from being absolutely compelling in their arguments, your professors were really treading on very thin ice. But the story of scientific materialism is very appealing, the pressure to adopt it is high, and your beliefs about God and Scripture that these views contested had been formed when you were a child. You were set up to fall.

At the beginning of this essay I said that over-reaction is a basic human epistemological tendency. What I meant was that people have a tendency, under certain circumstances, when confronted with a small amount of information that contradicts what they believe, to over-react to that challenge. Rather than throwing out some small part of their belief—just the part directly challenged by the new information—we will often throw out the whole belief as if the whole thing were tainted by the doubtfulness of the part. So, for example, if a friend whom you deeply trust betrays you in some small matter, you may become so angry and disillusioned that you dismiss the whole friendship as a deception and abandon the friend. Later it sometimes happens that you realize your error. You see that although it’s true that your friend harmed your trust in a certain limited way, with hindsight you realize that your friend in general was true and trustworthy. You see that you overreacted, you regret it, and you wished you could restore the relationship. Usually it’s too late.

In the same way, as a younger person you allowed your faith in Christianity to lapse, or perhaps forcefully pushed it away, not because some large part of the whole came under doubt but because various individual parts of the faith—maybe the story of creation, the reliability of certain biblical passages, or the problem of evil—seemed to collapse, and this led you to assume that the whole thing was collapsing.

This problem was exacerbated by an unfortunate tendency for people, when some particular aspect of their faith is questioned, to begin to see their whole belief system in terms of the particular part being doubted. If someone casts doubt on the biblical story of creation, for example, before long you’ll have it in your mind that the story of creation is the essence of Christianity. It isn’t. After a while when you think of Christianity, you think only of those parts that are controversial or uncertain. You quickly forget the many parts of the Bible that still make sense and attract you. The character of Jesus Christ, for example. His excellent teaching on human nature, tolerance, happiness, God’s love and forgiveness. His remarkable miracles, amply attested by no less than nine written first-century witnesses, who reference thousands of other direct witnesses. His self-sacrificial death out of love for you. The calm, steady wisdom of Proverbs. The profound, worldly insights of Ecclesiastes. The many enlightening and thought-provoking stories in the Bible that are seldom mentioned because they do not serve controversy. Soon the Bible becomes nothing but a catalog of scientific and historical error, violence, rape, racism, slavery, and judgment.

But look again. Your memory has failed you. Certainly the Bible contains a great deal that is abhorrent, mystifying, or opposed to the scientific mainstream. But the abhorrent parts are generally reporting evil rather than advocating it. The mystifying parts deserve contemplation and discussion, not derision and dismissal. And the unscientific parts—well, science only goes so far to explaining the strange and complex world we live in. Horatio.

But back then you panicked, and filled with the promise of new ideas ahead, you threw out the baby with the bathwater.

What I hope I am helping you reconsider is whether that choice was really reasonable, correct, or wise. What I have argued so far is that it was unreasonable because: (1) you were really rejecting your own childhood view of Christianity, not a mature view; (2) more was made of the correctness and adequacy of the new ideas than was warranted by their actual merit; and (3) you rejected a large thing—faith in God and Christ—on the basis of relatively small, relatively localized doubts.

There’s something else, deeper and darker.

The adolescent urge is to escape from parental authority, to take up one’s position among adults as an equal peer. This rebellion is perfectly natural, but many young people overdo it. A natural urge to challenge and question becomes a disdainful sneer at all authority. This urge—it is virtually an instinct—can often motivate a person to push away harder than they need to. And since God is the ultimate parental figure, the ultimate authority, there is a tendency to push him away too. “I don’t need you. I know just as well as you. I can make my own way.” Everyone has to go through this. But it makes for bad theology. Have you now grown past it?

Darker still. The adolescent and early adult years are also a time of experimentation and exploration. You do things you’ve never done before. Sometimes you regret them. Other times they make you feel guilty but you kind of enjoy the guilt. You see things, smell things, taste things, and feel things you could never have imagined (and probably wouldn’t have wanted to) ten years before. Then when you think of Jesus looking down on all this you feel ashamed, disgusting, and lost. You feel an odd mixture of fear and anger—fear that you might be judged, and yet anger that God might judge you. “What right do you have?” the adolescent cries. “I can do what I want! My will is my own. You can’t tell me what to do!” Invictus.

Denial brings a kind of escape. It is easier to believe that God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care than to obey, confess, or face judgment.

It all comes together into a perfect storm. The naive faith of a child, the bully pulpit of materialism, the drive to reject authority, and a growing awareness of moral compromise all drive you to jettison your faith.

But unlike the friend whom you could never again bring yourself to call, this discarded relationship can be restored. Your faith does not need to lie neglected.

For me the turn came—as it does for many, it seems—when I first held my son in my arms. Although I had never completely rejected Christianity, by my mid-twenties I cared nothing for it. This little light of mine was burning low.

It occurred to me then, standing in the hospital tugging my son’s little cap and watching his legs held askew at a ridiculous angle, that another father had held me in just the same way not so long before. I realized for the first time that the powerful, permanent love that I felt for this boy had been felt for me.

I never felt so much loved until I loved so much.

It changed my world. It made the planets and computers and creation and the protozoa and the particles all seem terribly unimportant—a mere distraction from the main event.

So I went on a quest to rebuild what I had lost since losing interest in Christianity, to reconstruct what I had failed to grasp as a child, and to reconsider what faith should be, so that I could live the best life and give the most love I could.

I’m still on that quest. But one thing I have discovered. The biblical authors, along with those who followed them—Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Lewis, Willard, and others—make more sense and hold more insight in their respective little fingers than all the scientific papers you could read in a thousand lifetimes. There is such a thing as a mature faith out there, and it is sophisticated, experienced, reasoned, fearless, and right.

I’ve always been one to assume the best in people. That optimism is no longer sustainable.

Without centering in on any one issue, it’s clear from a few moments of watching network television at any time of the day or night that the nation has reached a new nadir of widespread stupidity and evil—and this despite serious competition from the last several decades.

There are dark signs closer to home as well. For the past couple of years I’ve taught ethics to professional masters’ students. This effort has shown me just how little young Americans know about, think about, or care about right and wrong.

But foolishness amongst students, villainy among the famous and powerful, and bloodlust among the masses is anything but new. So what has brought this sense of foreboding now?

It occurred to me this morning that what is happening now is a particular kind of corner-turning that is new—at least for America, and at very least in the last 70 years. We are at a tipping point between the moral culture we have sustained since—so far as I can tell—the 1940s into a moral culture that I don’t believe America as a society has plumbed before.

This intuition hinges on the thought—a mere hypothesis—that there are four moral cultures to which a society can subscribe. The corner we are turning is the change from one of these four moral cultures to another.

The highest moral culture would be the Society of the Good. This is a theoretical culture—I don’t believe history has seen it. But it fuels much of our perceptions and ambitions about how people should interact and live, and so although it is never present it is always with us. A Society of the Good is a perfect society—perfect specifically in a moral sense. Imagine a community in which everyone is selfless, everyone is loving, everyone seeks the best for others. Imagine that you were such a person that in every circumstance you carefully considered and actually carried out the Golden Rule—do to others what you would have them do to you—regardless of the cost to yourself, and that every other member in the society was also that sort of person.

Again this is a dreamed-of community, not a real one. Every attempt to actually create it has ended in failure—often spectacularly. But the fact that such a society has never been formed—indeed, that such people have never been found—does not invalidate the beauty and goodness of the vision. It is—with some variation—the “heaven” hoped for by several of the major religions. Gene Roddenberry wished for it through his Star Trek TV series. It is also Rivendell, and holy elves are its citizens.

Ours is an age of sneering, so even to mention such a community or to characterize it as “high”—as if it were somehow above other ways of living together—is to invite ridicule and even an odd sort of reprobation. But until recent decades, American culture as a whole would have recognized the value of the dream and aspired to advance it if they could.

The Society of the Good is the first moral culture, the most aspirational, the highest and best. The second moral culture, therefore, is one step in descent from the Society of the Good.

In the second culture, people recognize and admire moral perfection, praise it in others, and seek it in themselves. But because each finds some evil as well as good in his or her own heart and actions, they recognize that their society is flawed and fragile. This is the Society of the Contrite. In this society, although people do commit evil, they recognize and confront it in themselves and in others. Evil is forgiven but not condoned. Confession in some form is a major feature of this society, and humility its chief virtue.

The Christian church aspires to be this sort of community. The tax collector who beats his breast—”God have mercy on me, the sinner!”—and Paul the repentant arch-sinner are its paragons. Yet the church seems only rarely to achieve and only briefly to sustain this vision. The grace required to address evil firmly but without judgment seems to fade from even the best communities. Self-knowledge too quickly corrupts to self-debasement, awareness of evil to legalism, spiritual discipline to physical flagellation, and confession to gossip. Yet the ideal—again—does represent something good. And in places some communities have, for a time, approached this ideal closely.

The third moral culture is the offspring of the second—sometimes literally. The children of morally and religiously careful parents often maintain many of the public behaviors associated with their inherited religion while surreptitiously discarding its ideals. For these children, good behavior ceases to be a passion and instead becomes a matter of avoiding the wrath of parents and other authorities. This subversion of moral aspiration to mere moral conformity creates the Society of the Furtive. The moral lives of its constituents are marked most strongly by a sense of shame, which arises from the conflict between the desire to “fit in” by being seen to do good while secretly enjoying behaviors that the society labels as wicked.

The film American Graffiti depicts the morally ambivalent and furtive culture of teenagers in the early 60s being raised by the careful moralists who had fought self-sacrificially in World War II. (Yes, I’m painting in broad strokes. Not every soldier fought self-sacrificially. Not every parent of the 50s and 60s was a moralist. But the culture, on the whole, was concerned with morals and viewed World War II as a moral victory.) The children of the original American pilgrims offer another vivid example. Though their parents left hearth and home and literally crossed the sea to form an idealistic Christian “city on the hill,” the children raised in this society held this ideal with much less passion. “Waywardness” and fears about secret sins dogged the second generation.

Before I move on from the Society of the Furtive, let me be clear that this is not a good or admirable society. It is characterized by pretense, legalism, hypocrisy, and moral confusion. No religion and no religious leader aspires for this. And it is the Society of the Furtive that we are now swiftly leaving behind.

But what we are taking up is even more troubling. This is a society where good is not only neglected but reviled. It is a society where evil is not merely confessed, nor merely hidden, but is joyously celebrated. This is the Society of the Evil—a society in which good and evil have, almost completely, flipped around—yin for yang—each mistaken for the other. It is a society of the evil because—quite pointedly—it is a society consisting of evil people in the full sense of the word: people who can no longer recognize good, who don’t want to recognize good, who openly despise good, and who busy themselves by constructing the biggest arena for evil they can.

It might be called, perhaps a bit less provocatively, the Society of the Free, and this would also help explain how it happens. When freedom becomes the central moral tenet of a society, then that society has taken the last step into depravity. Freedom!—such a beautiful word. And yet as capable of subversion as any other.

When freedom becomes corrupt, it becomes—ironically—the most rigid of laws. My freedom to do what I want trumps any action you might take, any comment you might make. “Stop talking to me!” freedom says. “How dare you say or even think I’m wrong!” Freedom sets up as tyrant, crushing all other moral discourse. Under its regime, anyone can do anything except what is good or loving or right. Under freedom there can be no confrontation except to silence those who believe in something (other than freedom), defend something (other than freedom), or advocate something (other than freedom). Freedom enslaves every word, every thought. Freedom rules over all.

In this climate, good and evil quickly lose all meaning. The thrill of self-determination is the only good; limitation the only evil. All moral reasoning reduces to, “Who can stop me doing it?” When the answer is “no one,” I call it good. When the answer is, “People stronger than me don’t like it,” I call it bad. (I call nothing “evil.” Evil is a limiting word, designed to impinge others, and is therefore violently forbidden.)

It seems to me—it’s an intuition based on observation—that America is moving into enslavement to freedom with a fervor and speed that can only be called religious. This has surprised me. The nation is thrilled with itself—ecstatic and throbbing as it ritually cuts the throats of old laws and definitions and mores. “Never mind what people thought twenty years ago and for untold centuries before. Those are the old days. Those people were unenlightened. Evolution has cursed them. We are the blessed ones, the enlightened, the Evolved. Our eyes can see what no eyes before ever beheld!”

What fills them with joy fills me with dread. They don’t see where enslavement to freedom leads. History has taught this lesson clearly. But history is dismissed as small-minded and its voice is quashed.

A Society of Evil cannot last. It will come under judgment. Calamity falls. And the whole sordid affair—from the vile celebrations through the moral collapse to the expanding filth and violence to the final judgment—proves a horror for both the guilty and the innocent.

That’s what I dread. That is what darkens my skies.

• entertain you and your family for hours each week?
• pull your kids off of the “screens”—TV, iPad, computer, and phones?
• create “face time” in your family, with all of you looking across a table at each other, talking, discussing, and laughing?
• build your kids’ brain power, their social skills, and even their ability to plan and make wise decisions?

Would you be surprised if I said that the lowly board game is the lost ticket to this kind of engagement and fun?

I am selling nothing in this post (truly!). But I believe so strongly in the modern board game, and am so convinced that playing more games will be of such benefit to modern families, that I can’t remain silently any longer. I have to tell you why you need to play a modern board game tonight.

But notice that word “modern.” I’m not talking about digging back through the dusty games cabinet to pull out Monopoly, Pick-Up Sticks, or Yahtzee. In the last twenty years, a new wave of board games has been growing in popularity, fueled by their ability to appeal to a wide range of players—young and old, busy and bored, extroverted and introverted, smart and not-so-smart. If you haven’t tried—or even heard of—a modern game like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride, you’ve been missing out on the greatest resource for engagement and togetherness around, and the best antidote to the modern pandemic of everybody-on-a-screen-all-the-time. Family engagement and togetherness, yes—but also personal engagement and enjoyment. Miss out no longer!

Americans are far behind the rest of the world when it comes to the games we play. The games you grew up with have long since been surpassed by a new crop of games that have emerged since the mid-90s. Many of these games are designed in Germany—where board gaming is a common family past time—and for this reason are often called “German-style games” or “Euro games.” Since players and designers outside of Europe—Americans and others all around the world—have taken up this style of game, I prefer to call them “modern board games.”

And if you’re not playing them, you should.

You wouldn’t think that the trusty old cardboard-cards-and-dice game would be ripe for innovation. But innovate they have. Modern board games feature designs and elements that make them simply better—funner, faster, more smiles and fewer frowns—than the games you grew up with.

To understand how, you have to understand what’s wrong with the games you’re used to.

When an American thinks “board game,” they think of Monopoly, Chess, or a party game like Outburst. None of these games live up to the sheer enjoyment of a modern game like Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, or Small World.

Monopoly is a horror. It’s a badly-designed game, first created over a century ago, that has somehow stuck as an American favorite. Alas, it has left millions of victims feeling beaten down over the course of endless hours by other players who seem to win by mere cruelty and sheer luck. Despite its status as the king of classic board games, Monopoly stands against everything that games are about: fun for all, fairness, a sense of competency and control (even for beginners), and the elimination of boredom—keeping everyone engaged all the time. When you think “board game”, banish Monopoly from your mind. (Burning a copy or two may help with the purging.)

Chess is the second game we tend to think of. And indeed it’s a wonderful game. But it’s also at the high end of intellectual intensity and abstraction. It’s fun—but it’s not for everyone. When you think “board game”, don’t think Chess.

Outburst is fun. But it’s not a board game in the full sense of the phrase. It belongs to the rampant horde of party games—games that emphasize social and verbal skills almost to the exclusion of any other kind of play. Other games in this category include Apples to Apples, Balderdash, Scategories, Pictionary, Guesstures, Things, Cranium, and Taboo. Party games are tremendously popular in America. If we’re not playing a video game, we’re probably playing a party game. And they’re genuinely fun and social—two of the main advantages of board games in general. But when you think “board game”, think beyond party games. If board games are food, party games are angel food cake. A diet without angel food would be a sadder, poorer diet; but a diet consisting only of angel food would be fattening, bland, tiring, and empty. Play party games, enjoy them—but don’t stop there. When you plan a game night, mix other kinds of board games in with party games for a more satisfying, more well-rounded, and just plain funner evening.

So when you think “board game”, don’t think Monopoly, Chess, or Outburst. What, then, should you think?

First, think variety. Literally thousands of delightful new board games have been designed since the early 90s, and no two of them are just the same.

What the best of them offer are:

• Accessibility. You can learn them—quick. Even if you’re young. Even if you’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer. You can get playing in a few minutes.
• Speed. You remember the old days when you would wait 5 or 10 minutes (or more!) for another player to complete his or her turn? Those days are gone. Modern games keep players moving, with turns often taking just a few seconds. Also interesting are games that keep you involved by giving you something to do on other players’ turns (as in Modern Art or Settlers of Catan). Or you may find games in which players don’t really take turns, but all play more or less simultaneously (Niagara comes to mind). Modern games keep you engaged—all the time.
• Interaction. Modern board games get you talking with other players—making deals, trading with them, laughing with them. There is an element of extroversion—of people-time—in almost all of the new games.
• Depth.  Despite this emphasis on accessibility and social interaction, modern board games will keep your brain humming. The rules tend to be easy to learn, but the decisions tend to be nuanced. I’ve been playing Settlers of Catan for almost 20 years, and I still haven’t figured out the One Grand Strategy. Every decision is intriguing, and every game is new.
• Fairness. What’s worse than going bankrupt in a game of Monopoly only to watch your friends keep playing for another two hours? Possibly this: playing Chess or Risk against an experienced friend who trounces you during your first game. Modern board games avoid these problems. Nobody gets eliminated early: everyone finishes at the same time. Beginners can win and often do. Modern games feel fairer than the old games, and this tends to make for happier players.

These qualities make for board games that get you playing quickly and keep you smiling and thinking from first to last. If you haven’t tried one of the modern board games, run out and buy one now. Target mixes some modern games in with the party games and the classics. Your local Barnes and Noble has developed a serious modern board game section over the last couple of years. If you live in a larger community you’ll probably find a board game store (probably lumped in with comics) in the area. And of course there’s always Amazon.

Which games should you try? Here’s a shortlist of the most popular modern board games that most people—not just most gamers, but most human beings—seem to love.

• Settlers of Catan. The first Euro game to make a splash in America, and probably the most popular. Puts players in the shoes of people settling a new island. Trading with other players is the heart of the game, but building your settlement is where the contest happens. Hard to go wrong with this one.
• Carcassonne. The quickest and easiest of the modern board games, but still offers intrigue and depth. Take turns building a medieval city with its winding roads and markets.
• Ticket to Ride. Plan train routes across 19th-century America, blocking off your friends before they get the sweet routes. I find that no other game keeps my mind riveted as deeply and pleasantly as this one. Another quick-playing game: if a turn takes longer than 10 seconds, it’s too long.
• Small World. Think Risk, only funner, funnier, and less cut-throat. Players spread empires of elves, dwarves, trolls, and the like over a continent that’s a little too tight to hold them all, resulting in bouts of friendly annihilation. There’s a bit more to learn here than in the other games on this list, but it’s still very accessible, and the wonderful artwork pulls in new players.
• Agricola. You’re a farmer raising sheep and carrots and cattle and such, building the biggest farm you can while keeping yourself and your growing family fed. This was the most popular modern board game throughout the late 2000s, and for good reason.

Kids over the age of 8 or so could learn and enjoy any of these. Do yourself a favor. Try one. Tonight.

Flash’s cross-platform support is impressive. Naturally Flash applications run in browsers, but in recent years Adobe’s AIR technology has made it possible to make native-looking desktop and mobile applications as well. Flash’s mobile support offers many surprisingly useful features, including native deployment to connected devices, a handy mobile device simulator, and Scout support for profiling Flash applications running on a device.

Most recently Adobe released FlasCC, which lets you compile C/C++ code and embed the result into a cross-platform Flash file. This, I was sure, would be the magic bullet that would enable me to write high-performance game features in C++, while crafting the overall game interface in the Adobe Flash editor and deploy the resulting application anywhere, easily.

Alas, I discover today after a day of toiling that FlasCC does not compile to native code (contra Google Chrome Native Client, for example). Instead, FlasCC compiles to ActionScript bytecode, which executes with horrifying sloth, especially on mobile platforms. The Box2D example that comes with FlasCC simulates 500 colliding physical bodies with reasonable speed on a desktop, but can only simulate around 20 bodies at the same speed on my iPhone. That’s what happens when you execute ActionScript bytecode on a mobile device.

Therefore, if you’re making a game with no real CPU burden (something like Simon, perhaps?), Adobe Flash and FlasCC offers a great way to create cross-platform games using either ActionScript or C/C++. But if you’re making a game that needs to do some real computations—run physics, for example, or serious AI—FlasCC is useless.

Adobe should consider enabling a “universal native” mode in FlasCC—a switch that would cause FlasCC to compile to one or more native architectures, as selected by the user, and bundle the result into an executable SWF (or SWC). Alternatively, FlasCC could output LLVM bytecode, then run a JIT optimizer and linker on the native system when the app is first executed. That first run would have a long startup delay, but for many applications that would be a small price to pay for native SWF execution performance across all supported platforms.

We have good discussions. “Good” by some definition. Oh, all right—invigorating then. Invigorating to me anyway.

But I am not always persuaded by the ethical arguments that students advance in class and in papers. So by way of:

1. letting off steam,
2. seeking commiseration from teachers of ethics in other institutions,
3. warning future students away from poor courses of reasoning, and
4. reveling in the unbridled use of numbered lists

…I hereby offer this Top Ten List of my least favorite ethical arguments; or, if you prefer, my favorite unethical arguments.

1. Hollywood has been doing it for years; therefore it must be ethical for the games industry to do it.
2. It’s hard to decide what is right or wrong; therefore there is no right or wrong.
3. People disagree about what is right or wrong; therefore there is no right or wrong.
4. Because of Evolution, new things are always better than old things; in the old days, people used to perceive X as wrong; therefore X is right.
5. It’s evil to say that something is evil; therefore there is no evil.
6. You are unlikely to get caught performing action X; therefore action X is not wrong.
7. Ethical intuitions and urges are a product of evolutionary biology; therefore people simply do what they are “wired” to do; therefore there is no right or wrong.
8. “Everyone” (contemporary society/everyone we know/everyone in this room) generally agrees that X is right; therefore X is right.
9. I perceive myself as generally doing good; in my experience of people so far, consisting as it does of parent-child, teacher-student, casual romantic, and generally low-stakes peer relationships, I perceive other people as generally doing good; therefore people are generally good; therefore discussion of ethics is pointless, because people generally know and do good anyway.
10. To me, X; therefore X.

In Suitors, each player controls a Jack. The Jacks are all romantically interested in the Queen of Hearts—they are suitors in the antique sense, vying for her hand in marriage. They have a long way to go to reach her, however. The first Jack to reach the Queen wins her affections and the game!

Objective

Be the first to move your Jack next to the Queen of Hearts.

Setup

Use an ordinary playing card deck with the Jokers removed. Search through the deck and pull out the four Jacks and the Queen of Hearts. Shuffle the remaining cards.

To create the playing field, place the Queen of Hearts in the center of your play area. Then deal, face down, a grid of 9 by 5 cards surrounding the queen. Leave the corners for the Jacks, though, and place them face up, one per corner. Jacks of the same color should go in opposite corners.

You’ll have a few cards left over. Just set them aside—you won’t need them.

Each player chooses a Jack. If you’re playing with fewer than four players, leave the unused Jacks where they sit. When playing with two players, it’s best to choose Jacks that are diagonally opposite each other.

Decide which player goes first. And begin!

Playing the Game

On your turn, you may either (1) reveal a card or (2) move.

To reveal a card, simply turn up a face-down card that is connected to your Jack. A card is connected to your Jack if there is an unbroken line of face-up cards between it and your Jack. Diagonals don’t count. In the following image, if you were controlling the Jack of Spades you could turn over any of the cards shaded in blue. If you were controlling the Jack of Clubs you could reveal any of the cards shaded in red.

Once you reveal your chosen card, your turn is over.

The other action you can take on your turn is to move. In a nutshell, you move by making a higher-ranked card jump over one or more lower-ranked cards of the opposite color. Here are the specific rules for a move.

1. A move consists of a “jump” performed by a jumping card (the “Jumper”).
2. The Jumper must have a higher rank than any of the cards it jumps. “Rank” follows the normal rules of cards: King beats Queen, Queen beats Jack, Jack beats Ten, and so on down. But Aces are special (more on that in a moment).
3. The Jumper must be face-up and connected to (by the same definition as above) your Jack. You can also use your Jack as the Jumper.
4. The Jumper must be the opposite color from all of the cards it jumps (black jumping all red or red jumping all black).
5. The Jumper cannot have participated in a jump since your last turn. In other words, if someone else moved it since your last turn, you can’t use it as a Jumper.
6. The Queen of Hearts cannot participate in a jump. No one can ever move her.
7. Other players’ Jacks cannot participate in one of your jumps. You can never move someone else’s Jack.
8. A Jumper can leap over any number of cards in a single move, so long as the cards are all legal and they lay in a straight, connected line.
9. You can’t jump diagonally.

To actually make the jump, simply pick up the Jumper, shift all the cards that are being jumped toward the space now vacated by the Jumper, and then place the Jumper in the space just vacated by the farthest card.

A picture is worth a thousand words. In this series of images, the player controlling the Jack of Spades uses it to jump over the Nine of Hearts and the Two of Diamonds. This is legal because a Jack is higher than Nine and Two. Also, the Jack is black and the cards it’s jumping are red. Jack could not jump over the Eight of Clubs, however, because it’s the same color as he is.

In that example, the player’s own Jack makes the jump. But any legal card can jump. In the following figure, the green arrows show other examples of legal jumps for both the Jack of Aces player and the Jack of Clubs player.

Strategy Tip: It’s smart to try to make your jumps as long as you can. It is often best to queue up a series of cards that can be jumped all at once.

There’s one more rule, and it centers around Aces. Aces are special. In Suitors, Aces are both high and low. Specifically, when it acts as a Jumper, an Ace is high—it can jump any other rank. But when it is jumped, an Ace is low—anything can jump it. So we should add a few additional arrows to the examples above.

Not only can the Six of Hearts jump the Ace of Spades, but the Aces of Spaces can jump the Six of Hearts. In this case the effect is the same either way, but in other cases it matters. For example, notice that the Ace of Clubs can jump the King of Diamonds. It can even, if it wants to, jump the King of Diamonds and the Ten of Hearts in a single move.

Because of this special ability, Aces are especially important in Suitors. If you can find an Ace, you can often use it to rapidly shift several cards at once.

Winning the Game

The game is over when one player moves his or her Jack to one of the four spaces that are adjacent to the Queen of Hearts.

In the above diagram, the Jack of Clubs has beaten the other Jacks by moving into the space to the right of the Queen. It is love at first sight.

This game design is © 2012 Jeff Wofford. Play it with real, ordinary playing cards all you want, but please don’t make a software version of it, or sell it in any form. You have permission to republish these rules so long as you credit me, Jeff Wofford, and identify me as the author of the work.

If you play Suitors, please tell me what you think.