Next year is the eightieth anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s delivery of the lectures that later became his book The Abolition of Man. Rereading those lectures today, it is impossible not to be struck by their contemporary feel. The reason is simple: What Lewis identified in 1943 as the key issue facing society remains the key issue facing us today, and that in an even more intense form. The issue is anthropology, the very understanding of what it means to be a human being.

Much of the turmoil in our contemporary Western world is a function of the collapse of consensus concerning what it means to be human. The fractious and futile debates about gender, sexuality, abortion, and race all track back to a loss of a sense of human nature as a universal reality in which we all share. …

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