~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.
Dives and Lazarus, by Leandro Bassano.
Oil on canvas, c. 1595; private collection.
Oil on canvas, c. 1595; private collection.
Discover the Wit & Wisdom of Gilbert Keith Chesterton
6/26/14
"Rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy"
"ONLY the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest: if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this ─ that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy."
~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.
~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.
“The most terrible thing"
G.K. Chesterton, the Diabolist & “The Most Terrible Thing”
By Tod Worner
“That quiet conversation was by far the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a celebrated British journalist, detective novelist, artist and Catholic apologist. He wrote over one hundred books, thousands of newspaper columns, innumerable poems, a several plays. He gleefully debated society’s intellectual luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G Wells, Clarence Darrow and Bertrand Russell. It is easy to estimate that he engaged in hundreds of thousands of conversations with countless individuals during his sixty-two years of life. And yet Chesterton considered a conversation with a fellow art school student “the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”.
What happened?
Continue reading this article
By Tod Worner
“That quiet conversation was by far the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a celebrated British journalist, detective novelist, artist and Catholic apologist. He wrote over one hundred books, thousands of newspaper columns, innumerable poems, a several plays. He gleefully debated society’s intellectual luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G Wells, Clarence Darrow and Bertrand Russell. It is easy to estimate that he engaged in hundreds of thousands of conversations with countless individuals during his sixty-two years of life. And yet Chesterton considered a conversation with a fellow art school student “the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”.
What happened?
Continue reading this article
6/21/14
"An attempt to restore the Family"
“IT seems that the Bolshevist State has been moved to make an attempt to restore the Family; and I only hope that the Capitalist State will be inspired to attempt the same difficult task. For in this, it can be truly said, all we like sheep have gone astray; and very much like sheep indeed.”
~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, Jan. 4, 1936.
~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, Jan. 4, 1936.
The Many Identities of GKC
A review of Ian Ker's G.K. Chesterton: A Biography
By Chene Richard Heady
"English Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was considered, in his own lifetime, a major writer, a literary virtuoso able to compose effortlessly in seemingly any form. He was noteworthy particularly for his contributions to the essay, detective-fiction, and comic-verse genres. His reputation did not outlive him, however. By the 1950s, enthusiasm for his works persisted only in Catholic quarters and then, as Catholic universities sought to distance themselves from the so-called Catholic ghetto, it faded even there. Fortunately, over the past four decades Chesterton has slowly begun to accumulate a major author’s scholarly apparatus. He now possesses an academic journal devoted exclusively to his work (The Chesterton Review), a carefully edited Collected Works (Ignatius Press), titles in the major classics lines (Oxford World Classics, Penguin, Everyman), and even a collection of literary criticism on his writing edited by the living voice of the literary canon himself, Harold Bloom. Chesterton’s work is also presently undergoing something of a popular renaissance: Million-selling alt-rockers like Marcus Mumford and evangelical Protestant hipsters like Donald Miller cite him as a major influence, and the BBC has just renewed its Father Brown television series for a third season. The time is ripe for Ian Ker to give Chesterton the primary hallmark of literary significance he previously lacked: a scholarly biography published by a major university press.
"For serious Catholics, Chesterton’s accomplishments as one of the greatest modern apologists (Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, The Thing) might be sufficient to justify a biography. Some of his central arguments — faith as the precondition for reason, tradition as the democracy of the dead, orthodoxy as an exciting adventure, dogmatic belief as the source of all meaningful social reform, etc. — are still commonly employed as defenses of the faith. But even viewed simply as an entertaining story, Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s life is well worth the telling. His rise to fame is richly improbable: In about six years he metamorphosed from an unimpressive college dropout working as an entry-level editor for a minor press to one of England’s better known literary figures. His composition process — scribbling brilliant articles in pubs just under deadline, simultaneously dictating an essay on one subject while handwriting an essay on another, tossing off some of the best light verse of the century as a contribution to a local charity bazaar — is the stuff of legend. His religious transformations are also dramatic, as he moved from an essentially Unitarian childhood to art-school flirtations with nihilism to an eccentric Anglo-Catholicism and finally to Roman Catholicism. Even his physical appearance was striking: six-foot-four-inches tall, over three hundred pounds, wrapped in a dramatic cape, dragging a deliberately quixotic sword cane across urban London. Even among the generally flamboyant Edwardian generation of authors, Chesterton possesses an unusually entertaining story, and up until now his story has never been properly told."
• Continue reading this article at New Oxford Review
By Chene Richard Heady
"English Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was considered, in his own lifetime, a major writer, a literary virtuoso able to compose effortlessly in seemingly any form. He was noteworthy particularly for his contributions to the essay, detective-fiction, and comic-verse genres. His reputation did not outlive him, however. By the 1950s, enthusiasm for his works persisted only in Catholic quarters and then, as Catholic universities sought to distance themselves from the so-called Catholic ghetto, it faded even there. Fortunately, over the past four decades Chesterton has slowly begun to accumulate a major author’s scholarly apparatus. He now possesses an academic journal devoted exclusively to his work (The Chesterton Review), a carefully edited Collected Works (Ignatius Press), titles in the major classics lines (Oxford World Classics, Penguin, Everyman), and even a collection of literary criticism on his writing edited by the living voice of the literary canon himself, Harold Bloom. Chesterton’s work is also presently undergoing something of a popular renaissance: Million-selling alt-rockers like Marcus Mumford and evangelical Protestant hipsters like Donald Miller cite him as a major influence, and the BBC has just renewed its Father Brown television series for a third season. The time is ripe for Ian Ker to give Chesterton the primary hallmark of literary significance he previously lacked: a scholarly biography published by a major university press.
"For serious Catholics, Chesterton’s accomplishments as one of the greatest modern apologists (Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, The Thing) might be sufficient to justify a biography. Some of his central arguments — faith as the precondition for reason, tradition as the democracy of the dead, orthodoxy as an exciting adventure, dogmatic belief as the source of all meaningful social reform, etc. — are still commonly employed as defenses of the faith. But even viewed simply as an entertaining story, Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s life is well worth the telling. His rise to fame is richly improbable: In about six years he metamorphosed from an unimpressive college dropout working as an entry-level editor for a minor press to one of England’s better known literary figures. His composition process — scribbling brilliant articles in pubs just under deadline, simultaneously dictating an essay on one subject while handwriting an essay on another, tossing off some of the best light verse of the century as a contribution to a local charity bazaar — is the stuff of legend. His religious transformations are also dramatic, as he moved from an essentially Unitarian childhood to art-school flirtations with nihilism to an eccentric Anglo-Catholicism and finally to Roman Catholicism. Even his physical appearance was striking: six-foot-four-inches tall, over three hundred pounds, wrapped in a dramatic cape, dragging a deliberately quixotic sword cane across urban London. Even among the generally flamboyant Edwardian generation of authors, Chesterton possesses an unusually entertaining story, and up until now his story has never been properly told."
• Continue reading this article at New Oxford Review
• See G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, by Ian Ker (Amazon)
6/19/14
"Blasphemy"
"BLASPHEMY is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends on a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion."
~G.K. Chesterton: Heretics.
~G.K. Chesterton: Heretics.
"Wars have become more organised, and more ghastly"
"I DO not know whether Martin Luther invented mustard gas, or George Fox manufactured tear-shells, or St. Thomas Aquinas devised a stink-bomb producing suffocation. If wars are the horrid fruits of a thing called Christianity, they are also the horrid fruits of everything called citizenship and democracy and liberty and national independence, and are we to judge all these and condemn them by their fruits? Anyhow such a modern war is much greater than any of the wars that can be referred to religious motives, or even religious epochs. The broad truth about the matter is that wars have become more organised, and more ghastly in the particular period of Materialism."
~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, July 26, 1930.
~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, July 26, 1930.
"The witches"
"PEOPLE would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children."
~G.K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man.
~G.K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man.
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