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Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Mere Christianity has a lot of good content, but if you end up finding it a bit simplistic in places, it's good to remember that it was originally a bunch of general-audience radio talks, so that kind of comes with the territory. As far as C.S. Lewis goes I recommend The Problem of Pain and Miracles for deeper treatments of their titular matters. They aren't perfect, but they are very good.

Lewis also has a number of good shorter essays (often adapted from talks) that are maybe not apologetics as such, but are also high quality and in the same vein. I remember finding "On Obstinacy in Belief" insightful, for instance. I can try to dig up a more complete list (I'll need to skim and remind myself from my collection) if you are interested.

Another poster has already recommended Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, which are very good but have quite a different tone and approach (and are much less recent). Lewis is more philosophical but also chattier; Chesterton has a better prose style as well as much more of a flair for melodrama and wordplay -- he often presents his ideas in a way optimized for emotional and/or intellectual punch rather than for clarity or airtight logic. (That doesn't mean his ideas aren't good -- they usually are -- but it rubs some people the wrong way.)

On the flip side, I anti-recommend... most pop-apologetics, frankly, and that means most of the recent stuff. Pretty much all of it (that I've seen, at least, though I haven't been paying careful attention to the space) is more or less in Lewis's shadow and is either just dishonest or a worse version of Lewis.