LAST DAY to Name That Podcast!

NEWER UPDATE! Wow, this is gonna be hard. The entries are fantastic people. You all get an *A* for effort! Today is the last day to submit names, and the winner will be announced on MONDAY so watch here.

UPDATE: Keep those ideas coming. The latest one with exploding seed pods is quite entertaining! (See combox for details.)

Exciting news, the American Chesterton Society is starting its own podcast, and we need your help! We need a name for this podcast.

ChesterCast is taken. Chesterton Moments seems to imply something shorter than I had in mind. Common Sense? Adventures with Gilbert? WonderCast? Breakfast with Chesterton?

I need some good solid ideas, and I'm hoping you'll brainstorm with me and help me come up with a great name for this podcast.

The contest will run for one week, till Friday, July 31st. If you suggest the winning name, you will win a Chestertonian prize. Please tell your podcast fan friends.

GKC's Cause

Please read this important post regarding Chesterton's cause.

Our own Dr. Thursday has also written a prayer and a litany for the Chesterton cause, too. Check them out.

Retrieving the Sense of Wonder

Our esteemed blogg-mistress asks about retrieving one's sense of wonder - thereby awakening a number of interesting responses from our readers. (Including me.) The question seems to call for suggestions - what is it we should do - or avoid doing - in order to begin to discover (re-discover) our world?

It's easy enough to point out that this disease - let us call it "wonder deficiency" - seems to arise more and more in our modern life. This is odd, because there are actually many more things to wonder at now than there used to be - even the most common and ordinary things have been exalted beyond what even great intellects and philosophers - even ALL great intellects and philosophers - have been able to glimpse.

Let us first have a brief review. What do we mean by "wonder"? You can use your own dictionary, if you like, but GKC points out:

To admire is to wonder, and to wonder is to wonder at something strange.
[GKC ILN Dec 6 1930 CW35:425]

So, it means admiring - you will perhaps argue that this is using the same word in Latin (admiror = I admire, am astonished at; from miror = I wonder). But it helps. If we begin to admire, we also begin to wonder - and to be astonished at.

So - awe, wonder, astonishment - how do we do it?

The first and simplest rule is this:

Decide that you will never, under any circumstances, be BORED.

Now, that sounds so simple - and so impossible. But it's not. How are we bored? For most of us, it is when we are forced to wait - at a turnpike tollbooth, at the supermarket checkout, at a medical appointment, or whatever. Or possibly in the curious instance of "having nothing to do" - which for me is very hard to imagine, but perhaps you will understand the idea.

Now, let us see what GKC tells us about this. Here is just one example:

For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter.
[GKC ILN July 21 1906 CW27:239]

Oh, trains! Do you have trains near you? Well, even if not, you surely have automobiles, and they ought to be intensely astonishing.

What - those dull, hateful monsters that roar past? Or you mean mine, that needs new tires and comes up for inspection soon, and that I pay through the nose to insure, and that just got scratched by some ne'er-do-well?

Er... yes. I mean cars. Your car, your neighbor's car (so much nicer, of course) - or those that shoot past you and take your parking space or cut you off.

What can GKC conceivably say that is GOOD about cars? Oh, you of little faith - you are about to have your socks knocked off!

The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical.
[GKC Heretics CW1:113]

There are two items here, in this automobile, which should give you two different means of stimulating wonder and admiration. The first is due to the engine (the machine) itself; the second to its owner.

Consider the car, and its engine. Do you have any clue what is under the hood? I mean in general, under any car's hood, or in specific, under your car's hood. Do you know how it works, and why? Do you have any clue why there must be an alternator, and how it "pumps up the voltage" from the battery so that the sparkplugs will work? Do you know? Or what 2,2,4-trimethylpentane is, and where it comes from? Oh, my there are so many questions to consider. I could make many other recommendations - from the traditional "first experiment" of chemistry, which is to observe a candle - to flipping through Gray's Anatomy or the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, but you will say I am over-emphasizing science, No - if anything, I have not emphasized it enough. If you want to wonder, you need to be overwhelmed with what you do not know - while preserving a real clue to its knowability - and so I direct you to Chesterton:

The child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide. And in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothing does he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity, than in the fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex things. The false type of naturalness harps always on the distinction between the natural and the artificial. The higher kind of naturalness ignores that distinction. To the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are natural but both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained. The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the gold of fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only spiritual or philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. The evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain.
[GKC Heretics CW1:112-3]

And now, let us proceed to the even more wonderful.

Next, let us consider the driver, or owner, of that car. Let us say you do not know him, for it is lots more fun when he is a stranger, and far more astonishing. Do you stop to think he is your relative? That, if you were to write down all the things you share with him, either in the physical or the biological or the social sense, you would fill dozens of libraries with the details? Do you know that he has parents as you do, may have brothers or sisters or children, that he has neighbors, and struggles with work, and perhaps delights in the same music or the same games as you - or maybe - wonder of wonders - he might like something different that YOU HAVE NEVER EVEN EXPERIENCED? You may be just a short conversation away from being dazzled by something new. No, I am not suggesting you poll passing motorists for musical tastes, as we ought to be polite. But this is about wonder. The simple secrets of the passing stranger - who he is and what he is, his delights and aspirations - are the raw materials for whole libraries of fiction. But then remember:

truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
[GKC Heretics CW1:66]

So perhaps I ought to say whole libraries of anthropology, the science of Man.

The science of Man - are you amazed or appalled? You ought to be awed beyond words, for is this not spoken of in the Psalms, where God is asked:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that thou visitest him? [Ps 8:5]

Indeed! Again here we have several broad avenues to explore - the whole vast Chestertonian literature of his mystical anthropology, about which we would need a whole department of our University to explore adequately. But though I am quite on the large side of human beings, I am not quite up to being a whole department, and so I shall leave you with the very simple and profound image of the door-knocker, by which you may begin to reawaken your sense of wonder...

a door-knocker is so full of significance that any person of quite average intelligence might write volumes of poems about it. It is - to name but a few of the things beyond question - the symbol of courtesy, the guardian of the home, the declaration of the proposed meeting between man and man, the salute to the rights of the individual, the sign of the bringing of news, the herald of happiness, the herald of calamity, the iron hammer of love and death. That we have a knocker on our doors means almost everything that is meant by the whole of our ritual and literature. It means that we are not boors and barbarians; that we do not call on a man by climbing into the window or dropping down the chimney. It means all that was ever meant by the old fairy stories, in which a horn was hung up outside the castle of the giant or the magician, so that the daring visitor might have to blow it, and utter in echoing sound the thing that he dared. ... It is still there, however neglected and debased in form, to express a dim sentiment that it is a serious thing to go into the house of a man. It is there to say that the meeting between one of God's images and another is a grave and dreadful matter, to be begun with thunder.
[GKC Lunacy and Letters 66-7]

As you practice you will soon be able to say something like this:

I am a Chestertonian, and so I am never bored. I admire machines, as I admire the trees and the stars, and I admire my fellow man as an image of God, who happens to be at the same time an image of me. He is a friend I hope to get to know better.

You might prefer GKC's own version, which he wrote to his fiancee:

I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.
[GKC to FB July 8 1899 quoted in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 108-9]

In conclusion, you need to begin to live in the real world. You need to "take fierce pleasure in things being themselves". It is not hard - children do it, and adults can do it far better. (Yes, that's stunning, but it's true.) You, like GKC, will touch the deepest philosophy, and you will recover the sense of wonder.

How Does One Regain One's Sense of Wonder?

Is it just will-power? Conscious effort? Slowing down, smelling the roses?

Chesterton had the ability to wonder at all of life, and I'm just wondering, how do we regain that child-like, that Chesterton-like sense of wonder?

Conference T-Shirt lovers

For those who can't make the conference, you have two choices.

1. You can purchase any leftover t-shirt after the conference. (However please note not many were made [also note: they were made by volunteers who also donated the work, the printing, the time and effort, and the batch of t-shirts to the ACS as a way for us to generate the money to do this conference] so they may run out during the conference.)

2. If you email me before the conference (by Aug. 5th, 10PM) (note contact info at left), I will pick one up for you when I arrive (when they should still be available) and ship it to you after the conference if you agree to pay for the t-shirt and shipping. Please indicate Mens M, L or XL.

As of this moment, I do not know the price or how much shipping will be, so you will have to agree on faith to a fair amount, not knowing exactly what that amount will be. But other than the shipping, you will be helping out the ACS by your purchase.

Chesterton Reviewed in a French weekly magazine

Les Amis de Chesterton’s July 21 blog post alerts us to a review published this week in Minute, a French weekly magazine. Critic Joel Prieur finds an “anthropological framework for reform” i.e. Distributism in Outline that other French reviewers missed. Probably because they are unfamiliar with GKC’s The Everlasting Man and Virgil.
Happy is he who is capable of knowing the reasons for all things, according to Virgil. Undoubtedly the reason GKC thinks of him when refuting De Rougemont’s assertion that church spires were phallic symbols.
5 stars to this blog – its author gave the French speaking world fabulous daily news on the 7-11 Chesterton conference at Oxford!

Translated for us by Barb.

Conference T-Shirts

Check this out! Thanks for our intrepid Ohio Chestertonian Bob Cook, these lovely t-shirts will be available for sale at the conference. Every penny will benefit the American Chesterton Society (because Bob donated them, THANKS BOB!)

Call for Papers

There is a conference at Pace University on "Christianity and the Detective Story." It will take place March 5-7, 2010 and the featured speaker will be Ralph McInerny.

I would like to get a call for papers out...with a deadline of September 15.

The Northeast Region of the Conference on Christianity and Literature
March 5-7, 2010
Pace University, N.Y.
Topic: "Christianity and the Detective Story"
Featured Speaker: Ralph McInerny, author of the Father Dowling series
Paper proposals due September 15, 2009
Please send to Walter Raubicheck, Chair/English, Pace University, 41 Park Row, N.Y., N.Y. 10038
or email Walter Raubicheck.

A Paradox of Witches

Something almost paradoxical happened to me last night when I was on the phone with one of my literary consultants. She had remarked about some lunacy or other in recent news revealing the near abandonment of reason in our age - and my friend (who has an Masters in Literature) said to me: "It's as if we're in a time warp".
To which I (who have a PhD in Computer Science) replied, "It's the witches in 'Macbeth': 'fair is foul and foul is fair'." Then we laughed, since she used a tech allusion, and I used a literary reference! I thought it was a curious paradox. But that brought up the topic of witches, which suggested one striking Chesterton quote. And no, it had nothing to do with Harry Potter, or even with Macbeth. But we did allude to fiction in general, and to the larger matter of evil, since she has been eavesdropping on my recent literary development. Oh yes, I think I've tried to drag that into your view recently, haven't I. (BORING, Doctor! Hurry up and get it finished, we want to read it. Oh, yes.)

Anyhow, I am in the final stages of my little writing project, The Three Relics, a fantasy which may someday stimulate curious discussions at like those about Harry Potter at the Blue Boar. But I shall not discuss that now. In fact, as I said in a comment there, I promised my mother not to go into any lengthy discussions about that series - quite simply because, as she said, "you have so much more that you should be writing!" And so, rather than writing ABOUT fiction, I have been writing fiction. That is, when I am not writing software. Hee hee. (I even use the same tools - see if you can figure THAT out, o literati and o tech-savants!)

Note: the allusion for those of you who follow such things was to something I posted quite some time ago, when someone in the e-cosmos wrote about poetry - that hardly anyone seems to care about it! See here for my response.

Ahem. Now, my fiction has witches - er - a single witch, that is a female baddie. And a handful of male baddies. Of course there are good guys too, and good women - and so there are some very exciting parts, as you might expect. (What else than excitement can go on in a bookstore? See Morley's The Haunted Bookshop for details.) But instead of trying to talk about Harry, or even about my own writing, since I have so little time just now, I will give you just a few samples from GKC about witches - for there is one of his quotes (the first I give below, and which I mentioned in my conversation last evening) that is definitely relevant to our own real world, whether or not the witches of fiction would agree...

...certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. 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.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:254]

Only witches and wicked sorcerers make men captives by their enchantment; imprison them in beasts or birds or turn them to stone statues. God's miracles always free men from captivity and give them back their bodies.
[GKC "The Surprise" CW11:302]

It is the first paradox about him [Walter de la Mare] that we can find the evidence of his faith in his consciousness of evil. It is the second paradox that we can find the spiritual springs of much of his poetry in his prose. If we turn, for instance, to that very powerful and even terrible short story called Seaton's Aunt, we find we are dealing directly with the diabolic. It does so in a sense quite impossible in all the merely romantic or merely ironic masters of that nonsense that is admittedly illusion. There was no nonsense about Seaton's Aunt. There was no illusion about her concentrated and paralysing malignity; but it was a malignity that had an extension beyond this world. She was a witch; and the realisation that witches can occasionally exist is a part of Realism, and a test for anyone claiming a sense of Reality. For we do not especially want them to exist; but they do.
[GKC The Common Man 210]

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history. To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts is in a literal sense religious persecution. It is denying him his full dignity as a citizen because he cannot be fitted into your theory of the cosmos. It is disfranchising him because of his religion. It is just as intolerant to tell an old woman that she cannot be a witch as to tell her that she must be a witch. In both cases you are setting your own theory of things inexorably against the sincerity or sanity of human testimony. Such dogmatism at least must be quite as impossible to anyone calling himself agnostic as to anyone calling himself a spiritualist. You cannot take the region called the unknown and calmly say that though you know nothing about it, you know that all its gates are locked. You cannot say, " This island is not discovered yet; but I am sure that it has a wall of cliffs all round it and no harbour." ...The idea of enslaving another human soul, without lifting a finger or making a gesture of force, of enslaving a soul simply by willing its slavery, is an idea which all healthy human societies would regard and did regard as hideous and detestable, if true. Throughout all the Christian ages the witches and warlocks claimed this abominable power and boasted of it. They were (somewhat excusably) killed for their boasting. The eighteenth century rationalist movement came, intent, thank God, upon much cleaner things, upon common justice and right reason in the state. Nevertheless it did weaken Christianity, and in weakening Christianity it uplifted and protected the wizard. Mesmer stepped forward, and for the first time safely affirmed this infamous power to exist: for the first time a warlock could threaten spiritual tyranny and not be lynched. Nevertheless, if a mesmerist really had the powers which some mesmerists have claimed, and which most novels give to him, there is (I hope) no doubt at all that any decent mob would drown him like a witch.
[GKC William Blake 73-74, 123-4]

Chicago Area Performance of GKC's The Surprise

From the renowned 20th Century writer G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy, The Man Who Was Thursday), The Surprise is full of jubilant humor, provocative ideas and captivating characters. Come and see this rarely produced gem, written by a man with a unique genius for illuminating profound truths through delightful and entertaining stories.

THE SURPRISE will be performed in a beautiful meadow in Big Rock, IL (just west of Aurora).
Two weekends, Thur-Sat: July 23-25 and July 30-August 1. All shows start 7:45 PM.

TICKETS are $10 in advance, $12 at the door. Seats are provided and refreshments are included in your ticket price.
Call 630-876-2351 for tickets and information. (Reserve TODAY to get a good seat!)

DIRECTOR: Dan Roche

CAST:
Randy York
Kurt Bullis
Damon Winters
Anthony Ritchie
Peter Frost
Sarah Aulie+
Lisa Enoch*
Rosheen Bell+
Luciana Poulterer*
Mark Frost

+July 23-25 performances only
*July 30-Aug 1 performances only

Original music is scored by Jennifer Spacek and performed by Thomas Ritchie, Annie York, Ritchie Dettman, and Daniel Spiotta.

The Bird and the Baby Theater Company is a new theater troupe in the West Suburbs of Chicago. The name is derived from the pub-house backroom meeting place of a group of British writers who came to be known as The Inklings; among this group, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. The company is under the artistic direction of Dan Roche, who led the Wheaton-based Stone Table Theatre in the 1990s, and has since produced and directed professionally in Chicago, Los Angeles, Orlando and NYC.

H/T: Bob C.

John "Chuck" Chalberg's Web Page

I hadn't been there in a while, but Chuck's History on Stage web page has obviously had an overhaul since I've been there. Good show, old boy!

H/T: Bob C.

ChesterCon09 Countdown: 17 days

Only 17 days till the fun begins. I am eagerly looking forward to being in Seattle, meeting up with new friends and old, discussing Chesterton, and sharing ideas.

Let me know if you are coming.

ChesterCon09 Twittering, etc.

I have just made a hashtag for twittering at the conference this year. I'll be at #ChesterCon09 --naturally! Check in frequently for up to the minute updates. See the icon at left to follow me (at AmChestertonSoc)

I also hope to do some blogging, take some pictures, and if I get the hang of it, videos up at youtube, too.

Stay tuned!

ChesterCon09 countdown: 19 days

My Plane Ticket to Seattle....

....is purchased! I hope *YOU* are going to be there, too. Please plan to say hello to me at the conference. I am *so* very excited about being able to come and am really looking forward to the conference, all the fantastic speakers, the preview of Manalive, the movie, and the premiere of the Honor of Israel Gow with Kevin O'Brien. I have a fairly long list of books and audios I want to have in my suitcase when I leave, too.

And I have a new project to work on and hope to connect to some people who know how to do what I want to do.

On-campus registration is now closed, and seating at the Saturday Night Banquet (not to be missed, believe me, I've never laughed so hard in my life) is limited, so please purchase your banquet tickets asap.

See you in Seattle!

GKC: "Whale:Bat >> Whale:Shark" ROTFL!!!

In my never-ending search for truth and humour - yes, you know that one cannot have humour without truth - that is, without reality! Ahem... I must not digress so soon in a posting, I have so little time today. Let me try this again.

In my never-ending search for truth and humour, I often consult AMBER with the barest scrap of a word, just to see how many thousand odd things show up in Chesterton's writing. For example, the word "than" appears nearly 18,000 times in the current collection, landing somewhere about 55th place in the most frequently used words. So it seems futile to hunt for a Chesterton quote with just the bare word "than"... but I wanted to find his stunningly odd ratio - you know that X is to Y more than A is to B, or whatever it was.

Yes, I finally found what I wanted. It was this:

You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:239]

Yes very nice. But on the journey through the vast variety of "hits" for our desired word, I found another...

Physical science has everything in the world to do with fancy, though not perhaps much in the highest sense to do with imagination. Imagination as we have it in great poetry is concerned with the things that fall naturally into an harmonious picture; but fancy is concerned with things which conceal an intellectual affinity under a total pictorial difference. Imagination celebrates the stars and clouds together, but fancy and physical science alike see that a squib or a pipe-light, or perhaps even a humming-top, are more akin to the stars than a cloud is. The whole fascination of science lies in this disguised fraternity. Nature in this aspect seems made of secret societies in the darkest and most misleading costumes. No elf-land of the human fancy can offer a kingdom so preposterous as that in which a whale is nearer to a bat than a whale to a shark, or a bat to a bird. This general consciousness that the most perfect similarities exist in the most diverse examples is a thing that must have haunted the minds of hundreds of good-working physicians when they saw the same disease attacking an aspidestra in a fernery, and an old gentleman in his arm-chair.
[GKC "Oliver Wendell Holmes" in GKC as MC 13]

Isn't that hilarious? As I said, you cannot have humour without truth. The whale (being a mammal) is indeed closer to the bat (another mammal) than to the shark (which is a fish).

This Whale:Bat >> Whale:Shark ratio is, of course, utter anathema to Darwin and his followers. It's even funnier to remember that the clearly and dramatically different chihuahua and St. Bernard are both the same species called Canis familiaris - but Darwin's all-but-identical filthy finches of the Galapagos are "not" the same species because they cannot mate. Wow.

But no doubt you read all that up in Pinckwerts, you fool! Don't you know that "the notion that involution functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe"???

Hee hee hee!

Bleg

If anyone who reads this blog knows of someone who attended the recent Chesterton conference in Oxford and can put me in touch with that attendee (or speaker) please let me know via comment or email. Thanks. NCB

Updated Request

I am trying to discern the historical setting for three of Chesterton's most important poems, "A Hymn," "A Hymn for the Church Militant," and "The Truce at Christmas." They all make reference to war, but they were all written between 1904 and 1907, when there were no military actions involving England. The Second Boer War had ended in 1902. So are these poems to be understood in generic terms? If so, how to account for the uncanny prescience of "The Truce at Christmas," which anticipates the event that actually happened in 1914, during the first Christmas of the Great War?

Many thanks, RW

Help Out a Blog Reader

I am trying to discern the historical setting for three of Chesterton's most important poems, "A Hymn," "A Hymn for the Church Militant," and "Christmas Truce." They all make reference to war, but they were all written during the early years of the 20th century, when there were no military actions involving England. So are these poems to be understood in generic terms? If so, how to account for the uncanny prescience of "The Christmas Truce," which anticipates the event that actually happened in 1914, during the first Christmas of the Great War?

Many thanks, RW

Anyone? What about the Boer War?

Blessed G.K. Chesterton?

Chesterton, Pope, New Encyclical

An alert reader sends this:

Not only does this piece quote GKC, it is infused with the Chestertonian sense of wonder, history and philosophy. I think all the blog readers will enjoy reading it.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_new_benedict_for_a_new_dark_ages/

H/T: Ellen F.--Thanks!

Newsweek Chesterton Mention

By David Gates | NEWSWEEK

Published Jun 27, 2009

[Excerpt]

In W. H. Auden's essay "The Guilty Vicarage"—collected in The Dyer's Hand, which I've kept on my night table for years—he analyzes his self-confessed "addiction" to whodunits: "I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin." I share Auden's fondness for Sherlock Holmes and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, but his reading habits could hardly be more different from mine. "I forget the story as soon as I have finished it, and have no wish to read it again. If, as sometimes happens, I start reading one and find after a few pages that I have read it before, I cannot go on." I've reread all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many of the Father Browns, more times than I could count, and I seldom have fewer than a half dozen of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries there on the night table next to The Dyer's Hand. In fact, I never travel overnight without one or two in my bag. And, as far as I can tell, without a sense of sin.

H/T: Gramps

More from the French Chestertonian

When it comes to translations of Chesterton’s works into French, the Nouvelle Revue Francaise published The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Plon published Heretics, The Eternal (sic) Man, Manalive (Supervivant!), St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas of Aquinas in the 20s and 30s. A site called the Catalogue de la bibliotheque de Paul Claudel includes all the information on works by Chesterton owned by Claudel. Is there a list of all books owned by Chesterton? [I have written to several people asking this question, so far no answers. -NCB]
Paul Claudel translated Orthodoxy and Valery Larbaud created quite a stir when he corrected Claudel’s errors. I don’t know when the translation was first published but Claudel was an early fan. I’m sure that I’ll be able to dig up titles and publishers of the French versions. What I don’t know is whether French copyright law will let a French Website to publish Chesterton. The French need a Martin Ward!
As soon as I dig in and find out how to get a hold of the French translations of Chesterton, you can see about using those instead of relying on automatic translators.
Nouvelle Revue Francaise viewed Chesterton’s writings as extremely important in their effort to evangelize and catechize a country traumatized and paganized as a result of persecution by the civil authorities. France needs Chesterton even more today!

The French Chestertonians Report In

I've had some correspondence with a French Chestertonian, and have some things to report.

First, I'm told the Google French translator is kind of a joke, so instead of that (under the former O Cosmos, now World Wide section on the left) I am linking to a French Chesterton web and blog page.

Here are some interesting comments from our correspondent:

Love the blog but I have some concerns about the English to French translation. For example, “It may be conceded to the mathematicians” should be translated as “Qu’il soit admis aux mathématiciens…” The word may when spelt mai means the month of May! Lovely tribute to the newlyweds.

Best regards,

Barbara H. de G.

PS Du lait et des armes a feu, s’il vous plait ! (There should be a “hat”, or an accent circonflexe above the i in plait but my spell checker is arguing with me .

More from Barbara tomorrow. If you know of a Portuguese, Spanish, Italian or other language Chesterton web or blog site, please send me the links.

Kevin O'Brien slated to do audio of Pope's new encyclical for Ignatius Press

This exciting news is hot off the presses.

H/T: Mark C.

For your consideration...

I have no time to write today, and rather than produce a quarrel by my writing, I shall just give you an excerpt from GKC for your consideration, and let you mull over it.
--Dr. Thursday.

The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this mortal has put on immortality. [1Cor 15:54] Even what we call our material desires are spiritual, because they are human. Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful. The man's desire for the pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain in economic history that a man's desire for money was merely a desire for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint's desire for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.
[GKC Heretics CW1:117]

Listen to an Interview with Dale Ahlquist on The American View

INTERVIEW: Dale Ahlquist, President, “American Chesterton Society” On, Among Other Things, The Question: Why Was GKC So Anti-Calvinist, Anti-Predestination

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EXTRA!!! Chesterton Scoops Jaki!

In my never-ending search for quotes and quips, I wander through the fifty-odd megabytes with my AMBER torch - and sometimes make the most astounding discoveries. But today I must preface my discovery with a very short reference to my fictional work now in development.

Somewhere in a lovely valley, surrounded by towering snow-capped peaks, is a fertile region presently being farmed by the local citizens of a country (countries?) whose name(s) I suppress for security reasons. On one of the mountain spurs soars a vast cathedral, with its various ancillary buildings. The local folk consider it a monastery of some ancient and most reverent order, and bow in prayer when the great bells ring in the tower - which ring somewhat more often than one may expect from the usual. In one of the nearby buildings, linked to the cathedral by a walkway, there is a large atrium called the "lobby" by those who frequent that building. It is a curious place, all the more so because the local farmers have never been inside. They would be puzzled, unless - like you - they had read Chesterton.

For the lobby is not empty. It contains many statues: statues of humans, done in a style which sometimes approaches the great sculptures of the world. But some of them are shrouded in veils, leaving visible only an arm or a foot - or the pedestal with a descriptive engraving. Does that not sound familiar to you? Perhaps you have forgotten this text:

If we were at rest in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational reaction from Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan honour to these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who first tamed a horse.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:200]

Yes, the first statue - twice the size of a normal human - is that of a male, almost fully veiled in black, with one bare foot protruding, elevated somewhat on a huge granite rock, and one bare arm bearing a flaming torch; its engraving reads: "The Man Who First Found Fire". The second is a chaste yet distinctly lovely female, also veiled, with a child at her side; it reads: "The Woman Who First Made Bread".

As I said, some of the statues are not veiled, and perhaps you might recognize them. However, there are others, which are clearly very recent additions, and are yet veiled. One of these belongs to my own field, and bears the title "The Man Who First Invented Linked Lists".

[One of our tech readers may be inspired to do a "literature search" and tell me who that is; all I can say here is that you are forgetting this is fiction. Besides, I might merely reply are you sure he was first? But I am digressing.]

Now, I have told you this, not to explain the lobby or the statues, or even to try to begin a short treatise on "linked lists" - which are just a clever technique to maintain a variety of information within a computer memory. I might as well have begun with the line from a rock-and-roll song (the band I have forgotten) which states very clearly that

"One thing (one thing) leads to another"

a concept appearing in C. L. Dodgson's famous study called Alice in Wonderland, and which Chesterton encapsulated in his famous quote about the encyclopedia:

...it is the test of a good encyclopaedia that it does two rather different things at once. The man consulting it finds the thing he wants; he also finds how many thousand things there are that he does not want. It advises the particular man upon his particular problem, though it were quite a private problem, almost as if it were giving private advice. And the man must be so far touched to some tinge of healthy humility, if it be only the admission that he does not know everything, and must seek outside himself for something.
[GKC The Common Man 240]

Which is curious in that it suggests doing a search on the INTERNET can be an act of humility - I think that mayshake some people rather deeply. Being shaken into humility is a good thing.

But again I digress. I was searching for something, now what on earth was it? Ah yes, it was the Chestertonian view of a train, so naturally I was trying to hunt for "fire" and "dragon" - and I happened to find GKC's interesting ILN essay for September 18 1926 in CW34:164 et seq. That essay ought to be posted in full, but I cannot do that just now. One of the things I found there (a thing which I did not expect) was another of GKC's arguments about miracles and the nature of belief, a point we have seen that he raises in Orthodoxy, and about which his excellent novella, "The Trees of Pride" (in CW14) is centered. But this essay also mentioned the fabulous creature called the "Great Sea Serpent". Yes... don't you just love the Great Sea Serpent? And that led me (as it were, through a "link" of a linked list!) to another ILN essay about the Sea Serpent.

Behold! I began to read it and was utterly stupefied to see Chesterton "scoop" Jaki about the correct technique of Bible Scholarship - specifically to the questions arising from "Science" (wit large, as Jaki says) and "Genesis One" (the creation).

The scoop I refer to is GKC's reference to St. Augustine. But you must read the context:

I should never be surprised to learn that some of our modern sceptics think that all Christians must believe that Noah was glued to a little round wooden stand, or that he had three dots for his eyes and nose. I should never be surprised to read a withering article in the Freethinker proving that all the principles of naval construction make it impossible for the Ark to have been exactly like the toy in the nurseries; or that the animals could not have fed and slept and taken exercise with any comfort, if they had been packed as they were in those delightful Christmas boxes, a large number of them upside down. The little wooden Ark of the toy-shop has defeated the vast mysterious Ark of the tradition, exactly as the popular apple has ousted the mystical fruit; exactly as the modern whale has swallowed the primeval fish, as well as the Prophet Jonah. But it is unfair to turn round and blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not read the Bible. I do not say there are not things in the Bible which a modern rationalist might refuse as not being what he would call rational, even if he had read them. But half the things he thinks of are things that were added by some earlier rationalist, to suit what would call rational. There is a philosophy which logically rejects miracles, as there is an equally philosophic philosophy which necessarily accepts miracles. But there is nothing very specially miraculous about the Great Flood, any more than there is about the Great Sea Serpent. Only some rationalists are so curiously made that they cannot believe in these things being so big. Quite apart from miracles, I never could quite understand why a Great Sea Serpent should not be big; or even big enough to swallow a moderate-sized Hebrew prophet.

In short, I only say that the ideas of popular science and scepticism about these things are very much in a tangle. The sceptics do not distinguish between what, on their own principles, they could or could not believe; or between what, on the other principles, they would be required to believe. They would doubtless be required to believe many things which at present they could not believe; but they have not at present the least notion of what the things are. Indeed, some of them simply cannot believe how little they would have to believe. I have tried in vain to hammer into the head of Mr. H. G. Wells, for instance (if I may allude to so large and illustrious a head in so irreverent an image) the perfectly elementary historical fact that the mystic and partially symbolic interpretation of Scripture is the old and orthodox interpretation of it; and that the mania for materialistic exactitude is a modern mania. At the very beginning of Christian history, St. Augustine said that some things in Scripture must be read as symbols, and that it was puerile to do anything else. But right at the end of Christian history, Brigham Young and the Mormons refused to see anything symbolic even in God's eye or right hand; and insisted that He must physically exist, like a sort of giant. A certain margin of mystical interpretation was an idea perfectly familiar to the Fathers and Schoolmen; and it was not their fault, or the fault of the Bible, if the idea was less familiar to Billy Brimstone, the saved Bootlegger of Kansas City, or Freeze-the-Devil Debora, the sweet and winning Prophetess of Potluck, Neb.

But in the Victorian debates between Science and Religion, about such a question as the Deluge, there was a double ignorance and an ambiguity on both sides. On the one hand, as I have said, neither the opponents nor the defenders of orthodoxy knew what was originally considered orthodox. On the other hand, the scientists knew no more than the theologians what would be the real outcome of the inquiries of science. They had no right to insist on men accepting the latest word of science as the last word of science. They perpetually gave themselves away by the very phrase they were most fond of using. They were always bullying priests and parsons for not accepting what they called "the conclusions of science." Yet they were also incessantly boasting that science had not concluded and would never conclude. Certainly their second boast has been less unlucky than their first. There is scarcely one of the conclusions of science, which the churchmen were then ordered to accept, which the scientists would not now reject. The Atom has melted into a metaphysical mist of Electrons; the Conservation of Energy is itself no longer conserved, even by the most conservative; and only a sort of priesthood of old obscurantist officials still shudders at any criticism directed against the name of Darwin, even in an upheaval that has shaken the name of Newton. If there was really any conflict between that Flood and that Ark, it is at least obvious that the Ark was relatively solid, whereas the Flood was in its nature fluid. That Deluge boasted of always rising higher, as if the world were all floods and no ebbs. But it has washed out its own landmarks, and none more completely than the marks of its own work of destruction.
[GKC ILN Apr 20 1929 CW35:78-80, emphasis added]

Now, let me give you the corresponding relevant excerpt from Jaki:

Augustine’s appreciation of quantitative relationships had, of course, no immediate consequences for the emergence of scientific method. His main concern went far beyond the acquisition of numerical data in particular and learning in general. What interested him most was the quest for happiness, and this implied far more than marshaling bookish details, a point well to remember in this age threatened by the tyranny of sheer learning and by the voracious storing of information. Possibly, he underestimated the role of man’s mastery of nature by knowledge in the process of securing happiness. He took the view that the knowledge of natural sciences, astronomy in particular, could not help one much in understanding the biblical message, as it concerned not man’s natural skill but his supernatural destiny. On the other hand, he wanted no part of a study of the Bible which purposely ignored the well-established results of scientific studies. He put the matter bluntly: “It is often the case that a non-Christian happens to know something with absolute certainty and through experimental evidence about the earth, sky, and other elements of this world, about the motion, rotation, and even about the size and distances of stars, about certain defects [eclipses] of the sun and moon, about the cycles of years and epochs, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and the like. It is, therefore, very deplorable and harmful, and to be avoided at any cost that he should hear a Christian to give, so to speak, a ‘Christian account’ of these topics in such a way that he could hardly hold his laughter on seeing, as the saying goes, the error rise sky-high.” Such a performance, Augustine remarked, would undercut the credibility of the Christian message by creating in the minds of infidels the impression that the Bible was wrong on points “which can be verified experimentally, or to be established by unquestionable proofs.”
[SLJ Science and Creation 182 quoting The Ante-Nicene Fathers; the quote from St. Augustine appears in his De genesi ad litteram, Bk. 1, ch. 19; also see SLJ's Bible and Science.]

So there you have it. Now I must return to my work, so I will let you contemplate these amazing links in the chain - and speculate on the identity of the other statues in the lobby...

A Chestertonian Moment at the Movies

We recently watched Confessions of a Shopaholic (I have teen girls at home, and we like chic flicks), and there was this little almost-Chestertonian moment.

The main character, in a somewhat inebriated state, writes letters to two different magazines: one letter is an article written specifically for that magazine, the other letter is a condemnation for not hiring her. The Chestertonian moment is--you guessed it--she puts the letters in the wrong envelopes....and I can't tell you more or it would give plot away. So, watch it for yourself if you've got any teen girls around.

Oh, and there is a funny running joke about Finland, too.