Lewis’s Screwtape Letters turn temptation into correspondence: a senior devil coaches a junior tempter on how to spoil an ordinary soul. Screwtape Proposes a Toast widens the satire into hell’s bureaucracy, education, and the soft destruction of excellence. In this Mythic Mind lecture from the Fiction and Philosophy of C.S. Lewis course, Dr. Andrew Snyder (professor of philosophy and theology) walks the letters and the toast: distraction as spiritual strategy, the war on prayer and charity, and why hell prefers cattle who can become food while God wants servants who become sons.

Topics include the mythologizing of science and progress, the Inner Ring impulse behind status, and how Screwtape trains us to miss God in the middle of ordinary days.