I just read a wonderful story about the Chesterton Society in Argentina. Chesterton is truly universal when he can garner hundreds of participants to come to a conference about himself when he's been dead now 70 years. The topics were things you might have heard at an American Chesterton Conference: "Chesterton and the Evangelization of Culture," "The Fiction of Chesterton," "Chesterton, Thomism and Creation," "Chesterton, Catholicism and English Journalism."
So, to become a member of the American Chesterton Society you not only connect locally to people in your area who love and want to read and understand Chesterton, but you connect nation-wide, continent-wide and world-wide.
This suggests a title for a future book: Chesterton: The Global Reader which would have stories of people from all over the world who have re-discovered the work of G.K. Chesterton, and how it has affected their lives.
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Let's not forget to tell folks that membership in the American Chesterton Society also gets people a subscription to the World's Greatest Magazine.
ReplyDeleteI'll speak with Dale on whether we should start selling Leg Lamps too.
Hi I'm from Argentina (and live in Buenos Aires)
ReplyDeleteChesterton is well known here. Specially among
catholics (a minority, if we speak of
non-merely-culturally catholics) but also
among the others (the mainstream culture, if I may
say). In good part, this little anomaly
can be attributed to the influence of the writer
Jorge L. Borges, who was agnostic but loved
GKC and alluded to him frequently.
Hi Agentina, welcome! This internet is amazing for bringing people together, and so is Chesterton.
ReplyDeleteSo they teach Chesterton in the universities there? In the high schools? That is what we are trying to do here, but the teachers and administrators think he is too old fashioned, or something.
Is there an active Chesterton Society? Do you think the active, seriously Catholic Catholics can renew the cultually Catholic Catholics before the Evangelicals and the Mormons infiltrate?