STaR Chesterton Issue

Dear Fellow Chestertonian,

The March/April issue of the Saint Austin Review is hot off the press. It's another exciting, power-punching issue, filled to the brim with great articles. The theme of the next issue is "G. K. Chesterton: Fidei Defensor" and we've assembled a veritable cornucopia of Chestertonian delights for the delectation of our readers. Please see www.staustinreview.com <http://mail2.avemaria.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.staustinreview.com>  for a cover image, a sample article and the table of contents.

Amongst the highlights of the next issue:

Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society and host of the long running EWTN series, "The Apostle of Common Sense", asks the beguiling question: "What if Chesterton Had Gone Bad?”

Louis Markos surveys "The Journey Back Home: How G. K. Chesterton 'Discovered' Orthodoxy".

Jennifer Overkamp examines Chesterton "the Fairy Tale Philosopher"

Matthew P. Akers defends Pump Street, in Chesterton's Napoleon of Notting Hill, "and all things medieval".

Geir Hasnes defends Chesterton "from those who damn with faint praise".

John M. Dejak, headmaster of Chesterton Academy, champions "Chesterton: The Just Warrior".

Kevin O'Brien, host of the EWTN series, "Theater of the Word", praises "The Drama of Chesterton" as "A Story of Life and Death and Life Again".

The irrepressible and indefatigable Jesuit, James V. Schall, visits "Towns and Places" with Hilaire Belloc.

The equally irrepressible Father Dwight Longenecker looks at "Chesterton and the Morality of Movieland".

My fellow countryman in exile, Father Benedict Kiely, a native of England now serving his parish in Vermont, discusses Hilaire Belloc and Heroism.

My fellow faculty member at Ave Maria University, Susan Treacy, discusses the connection beetween poetry and music in the verse of Siegfried Sassoon.

Film Critic, James Bemis, presents the first of a new series examining the films on the Vatican list of great movies, commencing with The Flowers of Saint Francis.

Patrick G. D. Riley casts his experienced eye over the American political scene from an unremittingly pro-life perspective in his regular column, Riley's America.

Book reviews in this issue include:

Thomas Howard on Peter Kreeft's and Father Tacelli's Handbook of Catholic Apologetics; Matthew Kenefick on Charles E. Rice's What Happened at Notre Dame; Michael M. Jordan on Lee Oser's The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien and the Romance of History; Lorraine V. Murray on Father Benedict Groeschel's Tears of God: Persevering in the Face of Great Sorrow and Catastrophe.

The issue is illustrated, as befits an issue published in Lent, by all fourteen of David Myers' superb depictions of the Stations of the Cross, as well as featuring two lenten poems by Father Dwight Longenecker and Pavel Chichikov.

Last but hopefully not least is my own editorial which compares G. K. Chesterton as a Defender of the Faith to King Henry VIII and Prince Charles.

Why would anyone in their right mind want to miss out on such a treasure trove of Chestertonian wit, wisdom and rambunctiousness? Well, what are you waiting for? Go to the section of the website that allows you to subscribe on-line! Become a Wise Man - Follow the StAR!

Sincerely,

Joseph Pearce

High School Chesterton Class OnLine Starting in Feb 2010

From Maureen:

Hey Nancy!

Wondering if you can help promote Robert Gotcher's Chesterton course coming up next semester. It's an evening course so it wouldn't be restricted to homeschoolers. Catholic students in other schools would be welcomed too. It'd be cool to get Chesterton out to as many high school kids as possible! The link is http://tinyurl.com/hschesterton

Dr. Gotcher picked the 2 books that Kolbe and MODG students need to read so this class would be helpful in fulfilling those school requirements. A nice bonus!

For people who like to save money, there's a $10 off coupon that expires this Thursday: r1ns52. Plus there's also an early registration discount that expires 12/31/09. So, if they register with the coupon this week, they'd save $25. Pretty sweet.

Anything you can do to get the word out to the Chestertonians would be superbalous!

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!

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.

Serendipity?

Someone on the blog wonders if it is some kind of karma to wander the blogosphere and run across the same Chesterton quote more than once. Does that mean that quote is important to you at that moment?

My personal feeling is no. After being on the receiving end of Google searches for Chesterton info, I find that people tend to use the same quotes of his over and over again in their blog posts. Occasionally, you find people who have Chesterton quotes as their signature, and so you see those quotes quite a bit.

There are many often quoted Chesterton quips. I now tend to think the less quoted thoughts and paragraphs more important than the short but sweet paradoxical sayings of his.

UK Chesterton Society

Dear Chestertonian friends,

I have great pleasure in informing you that The Chesterton Society originally founded in 1974 at Top Meadow, Beaconsfield, is back in action.

Dr William Oddie, the new chairman has hit the ground running and started things with a smart new website we can be proud of.

Chesterton in the Chilterns which was always really a local group/branch of the Society however continued to flourish, and as Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society said, -
"kept the GKC torch burning in the British Isles".

I would urge British Chestertonians to please join the Society and give her every support; check out the website and take part in the Blog. I am going to leave a message of congratulations and provide a link for our own Chesterton in the Chilterns. We will have the opportunity to post our notices on this site and Dr. Oddie has agreed to allow us to have a page of our own.
Happy times ahead!

- See note on a GKC Conference July 4th.

Best Regards
Martin Thompson

Chesterton Paraphrase

Using the words "vehicular cycling techniques" no less. Someone in Dallas who loves biking seems to also love Chesterton.

Check the side bar on the right for the quotes.

Chesterton Music Video Appearance

Via Chesterteens, thanks to Clare, here is an oldish Rickie Lee Jones singing Satellite video in which Chesterton makes a "guest" appearance.

Pretty fun, thanks Clare!

Funny Connection

I find it funny that when one searches for a particular Chesterton work, namely, The Blue Cross, one also finds references to a certain insurance giant in America.

But today was the first time that I wondered if there actually was a connection.

Chestertonian Explanation of the Fall of AIG

From Paul Cella, on the Red State Blog:

G. K. Chesterton, demonstrating his genius at the art of paradox, once referred to optimism as “morbid.” Since the moment I read that (it appears in the second chapter of The Everlasting Man, I have felt in my bones that it is true, and have accordingly nurtured a healthy repugnance for the braggarts of optimism. But as with many paradoxes... Read more ...it is difficult to explain without vitiating its power to surprise and thus enlighten. A true paradox is not a mere turn of phrase, a linguistic subtlety. It is attempt to fill a gap in man’s power of understanding. It is a rhetorical reach, a heuristic device to explain what is in the end a mystery to our meager powers of mind. The paradox is a human reflection of the mystery of being.

So in the hands of a master like Chesterton, the paradox becomes an instrument of extraordinary explanatory power. It can show us, as in a flash, a principle or precept which might by other means requires hours of lecture to impart. (There is an obscure masterpiece, long out of print, called Paradox in Chesterton, by a critic named Hugh Kenner, which lays all this out with great elegance. It ends with the astonishing claim for GKC that he be called a Doctor of the Church; and more astonishing still, the reader finds himself convinced.)

In this case of the problem of optimism, Chesterton’s paradox opened my mind’s eye to the surprising truth that optimism, being so engrossed with the potential for good things, courts ruin and despair by minimizing bad things — or, in the parlance of finance, by minimizing the downside risk. Especially when abetted by the modern doctrine of progress, optimism is morbid because of its tendency to induce blindness concerning man’s limitations.

Now I have a concrete, factual illustration of the problem of optimism, right in front of everyone’s eyes.

As I understand it, AIG was basically ruined by the wild bets of a 300-man unit out of London, the Financial Products office. This 300-man operation lost the equivalent of a big state’s budget and more, all by themselves. [Click here to read it all.]

I Never Cease to Be Amazed...

...at how much Chesterton's clear thinking would help some people at the Times Literary Supplement to think.

A Politician Reads (and enjoys) Chesterton

I believe it is because he is a libertarian, though, not simply by virtue of his politicianism.

H/T: David Z., thanks.

Times Literary Supplement Takes Note of Us

Time Literary Supplement author Sir Peter Stothard notes that Father Brown is good reading for these economic times.

After stumbling upon our blog, he ponders the mysteries of pancakes and economics in an interesting essay.

When Authors Speak for Themselves: Chesterton included

The Wall Street Journal speaks again about Chesterton, this time he is included in a collection of audio CDs of famous authors who are recorded saying something. Chesterton reportedly speaks on "The Spices of Life":

'G.K. Chesterton, too, comes off well. He starts out with precisely the sort of absurd gambit that one would expect from a writer of his impressive wit: "But while I should resist the suggestion that we must eat beef without mustard," he intones, "I do recognize that there is now a more subtle danger: that men may want to eat mustard without beef." What follows is an amusingly disjointed ramble about the "spices of life."'

A Blessed Epiphany from G.K. Chesterton

The Wise Men
By G.K. Chesterton

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but the truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And served the mad gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed…
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
(…We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone…)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.

The Defendant on Line

The 'Defences' of which this volume is composed have appeared in The Speaker, and are here reprinted, after revision and amplification, by permission of the Editor. Portions of 'The Defence of Publicity' appeared in The Daily News.

October, 1901.

And "In Defence of a New Edition":

The reissue of a series of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however, that this claim is so modest as it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeare and Balzac, if moved to prayers, might not ask to be remembered, but to be forgotten, and forgotten thus; for if they were forgotten they would be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are. The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself in Elysium...GKC

Good reading and a great on line resource. The Defendant, by GK Chesterton, on line here.

H/T: Stacie, thanks.

Wall Street Journal on Chesterton: A Century of 'Thursday's

The Wall Street Journal printed a fairly big article on our man GKC on Saturday, Dec. 28th, 2008. Titled: A Century of Thursdays: G.K. Chesterton dismissed his own book as 'moonshine', but it endures by Allen Barra, whom, I'm told is an American Chesterton Society member (go Allen!).

I read it yesterday when my spouse brought home a photo copy from the library, and I thought it was extremely good. After reading the latest Gilbert, I was kind of waiting for the shoe (of anti-Semite) to drop, but it never did. Yeah, Allen Barra, yeah WSJ! And yeah Randy Jones, too, who conjured up a new Chesterton caricature for the piece (check it out, it's great).

Dale Ahlquist, our intrepid leader, hopes this might pave the way for a WSJ article on our annual conference. Apparently they were there last year, interviewed a bunch of people, but then never produced an article. Oh well, things happen in the journalistic world.

Barra was good, quoted nicely and accurately, brought out some great points, linked it into the current presidency and the past election campaign, writing a nice, succinct and wide ranging (appropriately Chestertonian) article.

If you like the article, you can write to Mr. Barra, his email is listed at the end of the article. Even journalists like to hear some positive feedback every once in a while ;-)

UPDATE: I just tried emailing Mr. Barra, and it bounced, so I hope he finds this on his own.

Chesterton on Santa Claus: New York Times Dec. 22, 1912

In this book review (which I've never seen before), Chesterton defends Santa, and concludes:

...the only test of whether he is genuine is whether he is recognized.

In this article, which comes up, I'm sorry to say, as a pdf and more like a picture file than a word file, Chesterton is reviewing a book by S.R. Littlewood, The Story of Santa Claus. Apparently, Chesterton has mainly disagreed with the author, and seeks to inform us of that fact.

The third point is more obvious, but even more neglected; here it need only be mentioned to correct what has gone before. It should always be remembered that dogmatic and authoristative religious spend much of their time rather in restraining superstitions than in encouraging them, and that such enthusiasms as that which Protestants call "Mariolatry" generally display all the merits and defects of widespread democratic movements. If saints, such as St. Nicholas of the Children, do not exist, they were not a priestly deception, but an erroneous public opinion.

I hope you can download this and use AdobeReader to read it all, because it's great.

H/T/: Deb L. and Bob C.

WSJ Opinion: There Is a God

Thanks, Dave, for sending this article.

"He isn't real, is he?"

Perhaps a more responsible parent would confess, but I hesitate. For this I blame G.K. Chesterton, whose treatise "Orthodoxy" had its 100th anniversary this year. One of its themes is the violence that rationalistic modernism has worked on the valuable idea of a "mystical condition," which is to say the mystery inherent in a supernaturally created world. Writing of his path to faith in God, Chesterton says: "I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.