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Socrates in the City An Introduction

Can you imagine how happy I am that this book has come out? If not, let me tell you how happy—very, very. It’s a tremendous joy for me to look at the evidence of something we’ve been doing for ten years now and to realize that these talks are just as fresh on the page as they were the actual evenings of the events. That is saying a lot, because most of these events were magical. Just ask the people who have attended over the years.

In reading the talks in this book, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are treasures, nothing less, and to think that they are available to the readers of this book—that they are not lost to the ether but are right here for you to enjoy, just as we enjoyed them on the evenings of our events—absolutely thrills me.

But before I say more, perhaps you don’t really know what Socrates in the City is. Let me explain: We are a UFO cult. There, I’ve said it. Of course, that’s not for public consumption. To the public we present ourselves as an elegant and upscale Manhattan speakers’ series. So, I’ll have to stick with that description going forward in this essay, but you and I will know that I am really talking about a UFO cult and that underneath our terribly sophisticated street clothes, we wear cult-issue silver unitards with a nifty lightning-bolt-and-leaping-leprechaun logo. It’s quite a logo. But we won’t mention this again.

But seriously, it’s hard to believe it’s been more than ten years since I started Socrates in the City with the simple idea that the philosopher Socrates was quite right when he famously said that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” It struck me that in New York City, where I live, people weren’t being much encouraged to think deeply about the big questions—or should I say, the Big Questions. It seemed that there was something about our culture which worked against examining the Big Questions. I wanted to remedy that a bit.

Also, I realized that I have had the privilege of being acquainted with a number of brilliant writers and speakers who had thought rather a lot about the Big Questions and who had some pretty terrific answers to those questions. Why not bring them to New York? And why not invite my friends to hear them? And why not serve wine and hors d’oeuvres? And so, Socrates in the City was born.

As it happened, eight of our first ten speakers were named Os Guinness. That’s not a weird coincidence, but it is evidence of the generosity of a dear friend, to whom we here gratefully doff our caps.

I remember that our second event—Os was not the speaker—took place the day after the hotly contested 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Everyone had stayed up till three or four a.m. the night before, hoping to find out who had won. Little did they know the issue would drag on for many weeks.

So, the next night a handful of our audience members had some difficulty keeping their eyes open during David Aikman’s terrific talk on Solzhenitsyn, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel. Quel dommage! In all these years that has never happened again, but should it ever happen to you at a Socrates event, you should probably consider getting a good night’s sleep the night before and cutting back on the pre-talk libations. The act of open-mouthed snoring while Bishop N. T. Wright or Sir John Polkinghorne—or any other ecclesiastical worthy—is holding forth is still considered déclassé in most respectable New York social circles.

Almost all of our events have been held in the ornately gorgeous rooms of the most exclusive private clubs of Manhattan. The Union League Club, the University Club, the Union Club, and the Metropolitan Club have been a few of our favorites. The art in some of them is reason enough to attend Socrates in the City events. Besides, listening to a talk on how a good God can allow suffering is always somehow improved if your gaze can wander to a 1903 bas-relief of Hercules slaying the Erymanthian boar. We don’t know how this works, but it does.

We always begin our events with a reception where wine and hors d’oeuvres are served. Because of a lawsuit, we’ve had to cut back on the unlimited sangria and shrimp, but please keep praying; perhaps the judge will see things our way. After the reception, we begin our program with my introduction of the speaker.

My introductions have always been calculatedly dopey—or dippy— because we firmly believe that’s the surest way of letting the audience and the speaker know up front that we expect to have fun and that this will not be a ponderous intellectual exercise. We will not abide pretentiousness, but we will sometimes countenance a freewheeling Marx Brothers approach to the search for truth. To this point, my opening comments and introductions have often taken their cues from the speeches of Foster Brooks and Charlie Callas at Dean Martin’s celebrity roasts. This is intentional.

After all, who said that the exploration of the Big Questions and fun can’t go together? It was probably La Rochefoucauld, but who cares what he thinks? Seriously, I think that the fun we have is vital to what we do. We know that no matter how serious the subject (suffering and evil and death, for example), we will enjoy ourselves. We hope we’ve captured something of that juxtaposition between the covers of this book.

My philosophy is that answering the Big Questions about “life, God, and other small topics” can be fun if you know in advance that there are actually good and hopeful answers to those questions. Somehow, we actually do know that. Don’t ask me how. But it does follow logically that if you know there are good and hopeful answers to these Big Questions, then asking them becomes far less frightening. It is our firm belief that one shouldn’t fear asking such questions, and so, we do not. On the contrary, “let us beard the lion in his own den!” Or something like that.

So, yes, over the last ten years we have asked some of the biggest, baddest questions imaginable, and I think it’s safe thus to say that we have had some of the most wonderful evenings imaginable. It has always bothered me that more people couldn’t be there to experience them—which is one reason we’ve put this book together.

Our goal in this book was to somehow capture the ineffable—dare we say tingly?—feeling of what it is like to be at an actual Socrates event. Of course, there are limits. For example, our publisher balked at providing assorted nuts, cheeses, and two glasses of wine with every copy of the book. They suggested that this might be more cost-effective when the book comes out in paperback; so, keep your fingers crossed. But we really have tried hard to approximate the feeling of being there, of hearing my introductions and the speakers’ fabulous talks and the terrific question-and-answer section at the end of each talk.

In order to retain the freshness of these evenings, we have only lightly edited the raw transcriptions. To make the reading process a little bit smoother, we have, of course, removed any ums, ahems, and achoos from the originals. If you find an achoo in your copy, please keep in mind that it may have gotten there after the book was printed; so, you might want to ask your friends and family if they are responsible. And if you find that there is an errant um or an ahem, by all means feel free to contact the publisher or your local bookseller about it. But to save time, we always recommend first dipping a clean rag in some club soda and dabbing at the unnecessary word with short, vigorous strokes. If that fails, you might try some benzene and cotton or wool. Sometimes a fresh India rubber will also do the trick.

I should say that this book contains some heavy thinking, and thus it is not meant to be read in one sitting. It is meant to be savored and read slowly. Some of these essays are intense and will require periods of serious concentration. Please do not attempt to read them while driving a rickety panel van or operating dangerous machinery. The point of reading Peter Kreeft’s talk on suffering is not to get points on your license or lose a limb! Please read responsibly. As Socrates once said: “Know thyself”—and thy limits.

Incidentally, no Socrates in the City event would be complete without a celebrity sighting! Was that Abe Vigoda in the men’s room just now? Is that Godzilla slap-fighting Mothra in the coat-check line? Very sadly, we could not coax any celebrities into making appearances in this book. Jackie Mason made an appearance in some early proofs, but regretted that he could not stay for the initial printing.

But seriously, we have had a number of notable persons show up at our events over the years, many actors among them. Tina Louise (Gilligan’s Island), Tony Roberts (Annie Hall), Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond), and Armand Assante (Kojak, Belizaire the Cajun) have all visited us. The vegan pop star and musician Moby has attended, as has the carnivorous Ann Coulter. The incomparable Dick Cavett has come to a number of our events—and finally, this year we persuaded him to be our special guest speaker on the subject of “celebrity, fame, and other genuinely small topics.” Were you there? Incidentally, that was no piñata; that was the celebrity exercise guru Richard Simmons!

Usually, we simply have a speaker, but sometimes we’ve tried other formats, with great success. In September 2010, we hosted a terrific debate between King’s College president, Dinesh D’Souza, and Princeton’s Peter Singer entitled “Is God the Source of Morality?” Though the heavy rain that evening scared off a few of the wimpier New Yorkers among us, more than six hundred people attended nonetheless.

And in 2006, we had our first Socrates on Broadway film premiere. Norman Stone, who is the director of Shadowlands, the BBC film on C. S. Lewis, had just finished another Lewis film titled Beyond Narnia. So, that April, we premiered the film and then had a killer panel discussion featuring C. S. Lewis scholar Thomas Howard,¹ Bel Kaufman (the ninety-four-year-old friend of Lewis and his wife, Joy Gresham), Anton Rodgers (the actor who played Lewis in the film), and Mr. Stone himself.

But for the most part, our events are just like what you see in this book— an introduction and a talk and some questions and answers. Our goal in these evenings is not to answer these questions definitively and finally but to whet the audience’s appetite for further exploration. So, we hope that anyone who comes to our events—and who reads this book (that would be you, specifically)—will want to dig further and read the books written by our speakers. We hope you will want to continue the conversation, as it were. Yo, what it is. [Exit, pursued by a bear.]

You might wonder how with so many terrific talks to choose from we chose the eleven in this book. Basically, we were looking for the most typical and representative talks over the last ten years. All of the more than sixty talks we’ve had in the last decade are wonderful in their own way, with the embarrassing exception of the last talk in this book, which was shoehorned in by the board of Socrates in the City over the angry objections of the speaker, who is currently lawyering up like crazy for a battle royale that will likely fill the pages of the New York Post for months. Just you wait.

Let me close by saying that we would love for you to come to an actual event in New York City. Even though we’ve done a handful of events in other parts of the country—Chicago and Dallas and San Francisco—Socrates in the City is very much a Manhattan-based phenomenon. By the way, I almost forgot to mention that we have even had invitations to hold SITC events in London and Berlin.

Where were we? Oh, yes, we would love for you to visit us and experience our events for yourself. That’s a fact, and we look forward to meeting you in person. But until you can join us at one of our events, we are genuinely thrilled to be able to bring the spirit and substance of Socrates in the City to you in this handy book form. It is our sincere privilege and pleasure to be able to do so. Soli Deo gloria.

Eric Metaxas

Founder, president, and host, Socrates in the City

May 2011

¹ Dr. Howard has also been a Socrates in the City speaker, giving a spectacular 2003 talk on his must-read book Chance or the Dance? That talk would be in this book, but we somehow lost the recording of it. Rest assured we are still lashing ourselves with wet noodles over this, by way of penance. We do very highly recommend that stagger-ingly wonderful book to you, dear reader. It’s published by Ignatius Press.