Chesterton Rocks

Really.  Portland based indy band (playing the music this author enjoys, actually) has a new album out this week with an all too familiar title.  A Hope For Home has released The Everlasting Man, which more than a few sources have told me is in fact from Mr. Chesterton’s book.  I don’t know that this band is a “Christian band” per se, but their lyrics seem to be lifted from various readings in scripture and other Christian apologists from the last century.  Their music might be described as screamo, but I got out of inventing genres since leaving my punk days behind.  Good, hard driving guitar and cookie-monster vocals may not appeal to the vast majority of my readers, but their music suits me just fine.

Check out their myspace page here and buy their album here or on ITunes.  Enjoy!

Napa Valley Chestetonians Unite!

Dale Ahlquist, author, TV host, and president of the G.K. Chesterton Society, presents an illuminating and inspiring talk on the wit, wisdom and sanctity of G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton was profound and prolific in his defense of Christianity and the Church, using his good-humored battle with words against various evils in today’s world. Free. Nov. 15, 7:30 p.m. Kolbe Academy-Trinity Prep, 2055 Redwood Road, Napa. Info, tony@ignatius.com

Please let me know how it goes!

Third Ways

“Variety has died as the small farmers, shopkeepers and artisans have been swept away by giant agribusiness, chain stores and factories.”

So ends one of the points in Walt Garlington’s essay in his Monroe News Star article about the ideas of Distributism against the black/white mentality of the capitalist and socialist debate that keeps growing in the economic slump.  Mr. Garlington seems to be a fairly knowledgable writer on the subjet and I am surprised he found a newspaper to pick it up, and even a local newspaper which keeps to the distributist calling.

Do read the article, and for anyone else interested in the other ideas of economics (especially of scale) do read Joseph Pearce’s Small is Still Beautiful which offers a rather nice review of economics and living with a view towards ethics and sustainablility.

Did He Ever Leave?

Christianity Today posted on the history of Chesterton’s return to the public square.  Get the article here.

A prophet is never welcome in his own hometown. For a long time after the tumult of the Sixties, G. K. Chesterton’s writings seemed to have lost a welcome anywhere, except, perhaps, among the detective fiction enthusiasts who have kept the Father Brown tales in circulation continuously on both sides of the Atlantic. According to Denis J. Conlon, an English literary scholar who has specialized in Chesterton for many years, much of Chesterton’s work is still out of print and hard-to-get in his own merry England. A friend of mine studying in Rome a few years ago told me that the English and Irish Catholic seminarians he met almost universally regarded Chesterton a pre-modern, pre-Vatican II embarrassment. The situation was about the same in America for a long time. As of 1985 there were probably fewer than ten of Chesterton’s books in print, and those were, aside from his detective fiction, mostly published by small and often obscure Catholic presses.

The situation was bound to change, however, as this particular prophet still had his faithful remnant, about thirty-five of whom (at most) met throughout the Eighties and early Nineties in Milwaukee every year and exchanged news and views in a little rag called theMidwest Chesterton News. On the more scholarly side, Ian Boyd, a priest and literary scholar, had since 1974 been running the Chesterton Review, a literary quarterly that printed forgotten pieces by Chesterton as well as scholarly essays on his life, thought, and interlocutors. Ignatius Press, a small but growing outfit run by Joseph Fessio, SJ (one of Joseph Ratzinger’s doctoral students), decided to publish a collected works with scholarly introductions and footnotes that will eventually number roughly 50 volumes. And newly emerging publications like Crisis, New Oxford Review, and First Things quoted Chesterton incessantly and sometimes ran articles about him. He even began popping up inChristianity Today, where he had fans in Philip Yancey and Charles Colson.

We Argue Because It Matters

First, let me say I can’t endorse this site as I know almost nothing about it (though it seems, on a first impression, to be light-hearted but serious Evangelical blog site).  However, Chris Russo over at ReveLife has a rather intriguing post on why he loves atheists and why, next to paganism, they exist as his favorite belief system outside of Christianity.  Using Mr. Chesterton’s brilliant work, The Ball and the Cross, Mr. Russo discusses the idea that Christians and atheists are among the few in the post-modern world who actually think that belief matters and is worth at least a discussion, if not an argument.  In addressing the post-modern silliness that “all religions are the same,” he makes a point that I’ve been trying to make for the last seven years: if everyone is equally right, then everyone is equally wrong.

I too have always found the honesty of atheists a bit of a relief, in many ways.  Certainly, I wish Dawkins would have a cursory knowledge of philosophy and religion before engaging in it and I also wish Hitchins would use one footnote or bibliography when denouncing popular figures, but I have to appreciate their honesty.  Instead of blatant honesty we tend to encourage a society that must lie to themselves or else be seen as uncharitable and bigoted; so it is that we have many people who believe, to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, that their hatred of Christianity is actually a form of loving religion.  It is important that we are honest with ourselves and with others if we wish for a frank debate and real dialogue, the type of dialogue that is aimed at understanding and finding the truth.  It is the truth, indeed, that makes having an argument worthwhile, for only in believing that there is truth to be found that we can argue with any type of joy .  Cheers for a good post, Mr. Russo!

Chicago: The Man Who Was Thursday

New Leaf Theatre is currently undertaking a production of GK Chesterton’s masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thrusday.  I have not seen the show, just yet, but it seems to be earning some quite positive reviews.  All my fellow citizens of the Windy City ought to make it when they can, and do please let me know how it went.

Get tickets here, and check out the trailer:

More on St. Chesterton

Mark Shea talks a little more about “the cause” for Chesterton’s canonization and about the issue of his usage of a particular N word.

Some flame and passion from fans in the combox too.  Make sure you read them.

How Many People Have GKC in Their Top 10

Taylor Marshall of Canterbury Tales makes a Top 10 list of books, and lists Orthodoxy as number 10.

What are your top 10 books?

(Marshall is another convert by the way–I’m thinking I”m going to make a list of people who have had a conversion experience from reading GKC.)

writing in white

“The aim of human polity is human happiness. But this does not mean that we are obligated to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or progressive. We are not obligated to be any of these things if they do not make us happier.” –”The Outline of Sanity” by GK Chesterton.

When I started to write this small, little reflection this morning, I cut and paste a quote from GKC into my Google doc.  The little cursor timer told me that something was happening, and I could see that something had happened.

But the page was blank.

I hit control + v again.  And still my page was blank.  The cursor had moved as if something was there.  I was frustrated beyond measure.  I am wife to a busy doctor with a stressful practice, a mother of a two-year old and a 9 month old baby, finishing a dissertation, and struggling to work as a freelance writer and editor.  I allow myself time to write essays, short stories and fiction, in small 15 minute increments.  15 minutes are magic in my life, and I am amazed at what I am enabled to do in these small chunks of time, guided by a little white timer on my desk, dedicated to the purpose of free writing in this small, rather humble time.  (Which is good because the delusions of grandeur that shadow writers and artists tend to be anything but small and humble.)

I place a certain trust in my timer, an enchantment, if you will.  If I believe that the timer is connected to something bigger, a Force–not unlike the kind Luke Skywalker tapped into–that wants me to write, it will allow 15 minutes to stretch almost into eternity if needs be.  I also have a list.  The list keeps my multiple projects in front of me, so that when an unexpected 15 lands on my desk, I don’t have to waste time wondering or planning what to do.  I put that struggle into the list beforehand so that when I’m ready the work meets me and I meet the work instantly.  I believe in that list and the list believes in me.  It will always give me exactly the right thing to work on and I will always give it my absolute best and attention.

That is except for when stuff–or something else that starts with s that is rather less polite than stuff–happens.  Like this morning, when the timer began running only a short time before my babies were due to awake,  only hours before eight well-beloved families were to arrive at my house for a celebration we are hosting here.  Control + v.  Control + v.  Nothing.

That’s when I begin to doubt.  To doubt my list, to doubt my timer, to doubt the illusion that I can accomplish anything in this world (or the next) with all the plates I keep spinning and up in the air on a daily basis, with out anything to break their fall on the cold grey tiles of my kitchen floor. And then I also imagine my two sweet daughters playing on that floor amidst the broken shards of my foolishness and I feel shame for having reached so high in the first place.   In that moment, I was about to break from my page and shut the damned, stupid timer off,  but I looked at the cursor winking at me in the middle of the page and realized something rather mundane and rather shocking nonetheless, a digital fact with all the gravity of insight and the faintest whiff of revelation.

The font was set to white.  I highlighted the invisible text on the page, and the page was half-filled with my efforts even though I couldn’t see it was there.  And that’s when this essay began to fill the page in black, and the essay I started to write became a rather different sort of essay than the one I thought I was starting to write.  I started to write about the pursuit of happiness and how it doesn’t lead you to the places where you think it should go but its the pursuit that keeps us to the course, which is not really narrow but as broad as the Tiber at Tiber Island and as deep as the Atlantic at its heart.

But of course, I wrote this instead.  And perhaps this was the essay the Timer and the List had in mind all the time–and the Author of those tools, who certainly isn’t Me, chuckles to himself especially at the delectable irony of the key names CONTROL + V. I could almost feel a pat on my head as I heard my daughters stir in their cribs.

“In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints gorgeously, I had almost said gaudily, as when He paints white.” -”A Piece of Chalk”–by GK Chesterton.

GKC and the Conversion of CS Lewis

Daniel Townsend writes about CS Lewis’s conversion via Chesterton.

I really hope that the conversation about his prospective sainthood includes the numerous people who have experienced conversion through his work.