Gretchen Rubin: Right On

A discussion of Chesterton's "It's easy to be heavy; hard to be light" thoughts.

The Universe and Mr. Chesterton Reviewed by J. Peterson in Gilbert magazine

Thanks to John for allowing me to put this here for those of you (Nick, et al) interested in Chesterton, philosophy, and Orthodoxy.

A Landmark Chesterton Study

The Universe and Mr. Chesterton
by Randall Paine
Peru Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1999
Reviewed by John Peterson


This 160-page study of Chesterton is the book many of us have been hoping for, and a book many of us feared would never be written.

Since his death in 1936, ninety books about Chesterton have been published in the English language. There are major book-length studies of Chesterton from expert and scholarly professors of Literature, Journalism, History, Government, Political Science, Physical Science, Drama, Theology, and Pop Culture. It is not easy to think of another writer whose major commentators come from such a variety of disciplines.

Unfortunately, the list has not included a satisfactory book on Chesterton as a philosopher. Read more.The previous effort in this direction, Philosopher without Portfolio by Fordham's Quentin Lauer, S.J., consisted largely of the kind of faint praise that is both dismissive and condescending. ("Chesterton's ingenious mind enabled him to find what he considered rational grounds for affirming what he preferred to be true.")



In 1989, the year after Father Lauer's book was published, another priest completed a study of Chesterton the philosopher. This was Father Randall Paine, an American who has lived abroad since 1974, and who is for all practical purposes an unknown in Chesterton circles. After he was ordained by Pope John Paul II in 1983, Paine studied philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. His dissertation bore the title Chesterton and the Universe, and, as happens with the vast majority of such documents, has been lost in obscurity ever since.



But no longer. Fortunately for us all, Sherwood Sugden Publishers have come to the rescue. Now a newly edited paperback version of Father Paine's dissertation has appeared with a new title, a brief new concluding chapter, and an added appendix. You must read it. Paine's is the definitive study of Chesterton the philosopher.



After a brief overview of Chesterton as a thinker and rhetorician, Paine launches into a review of western philosophy's descent into subjectivism or what Etienne Gilson called the "300-year detour in Western thought." Paine terms this "The great refusal of modern philosophy" that began with René Descartes systematic doubt and ended in the blind alley of Edmund Hussert's phenomenology. Paine next discusses the remedy for such errors, which he believes to be nothing less than heavy doses of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. With this background in place, the author takes us through a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Chesterton's Orthodoxy to show that it is essentially a new and original exposition of the fundamentals of the Aristotelian and Thomistic approach. Paine's conclusion is that Chesterton's "remedial metaphysics" has truly enriched our philosophical heritage.



The foregoing summary was sketchy and deliberately so. I would not want to spoil this book for you by posting all of Paine's conclusions minus his arguments and documentation. I will simply promise that if you read The Universe and Mr. Chesterton you will learn exactly what was behind Gilson's remark that "Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed."

Thank you John "Gramps" Peterson.

To read another interesting article by Father Paine on the "Dead" language of Latin, click here. To read an article by Father Paine on Chesterton's Autobiography, click here.

Season Four: Apostle of Common Sense

The 4th season of “The Apostle of Common Sense” with all-new episodes will begin to air on Sunday, March 2nd (9 pm EST, 8 pm CST) on EWTN. The first episode “The Only Man I Regularly Read” will have a bedroom scene!!!

The Press takes note of the new Chesterton Academy

Read about an article which appears in the Wanderer about the Chesterton Academy.

UPDATE: Now you can read it here.

Great Commentary on Orthodoxy

Read it here.

The Universe and Mr. Chesterton

From the Combox, Nick asked:

"Do you know of any systematic theologians or philosophers who have done in depth explorations of Orthodoxy?"

And Mr. Ahlquist answered:

The Universe and Mr. Chesterton by Randall Paine is about the closest he’s going to come.

I hope that helps.

Chris Discovers Chesterton

"My parents bought me Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton for Christmas. I was a few weeks before I was able to get to it, but once I read the first few pages I couldn’t put it down. I finished it just a few days later wondering how I could have never read anything by Chesterton before. He has a very unique style, very funny, with deep insights into human nature and society. He uses metaphor extremely effectively, and quite frequently to humorous effect throughout his works. His works have had an influence on other writers I love, including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Orthodoxy was written in 1908, 100 years ago now. And yet amazingly it’s still relevant today."

Want to Review Chesterton Books?

From Mike:
Looking for places to send review copies of Chesterton on War and Peace, I came across what seems to be an excellent provider of book reviewers, the Midwest Book Review. Quite a few libraries use them to discover new books and Amazon quotes them.

Given the volume of submissions, they only review about half the books they get. Chesterton fans with a knack for reviewing might want to volunteer as a reviewer. They'd get free copies of Chesterton books as they come out and have an opportunity to make sure Chesterton books get reviewed as well as to persuade libraries to carry them.

They can contact the editor-in-chief, James Cox.

There are more details.

It'd be a great way to get Chesterton in more libraries.

--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

Dr. Thursday's Post

Before we begin, an observation: If you went to Mass on Sunday, you may have been surprised - as I was - to hear the reading from Genesis about how in Eden, after the eating of the forbidden fruit, "their eyes were opened". I certainly didn't plan that juxtaposition. I wonder what eerie parallel will happen this week. Hee hee.

If I had my own blogg again (which seems ever more unlikely due to, uh, matters beyond my control) I could probably fill several gigs of your disk space with comments about the eye, eyesight, light, and a variety of related matters. As a Roman Catholic, a scientist-without-restrictive-adjective, a Chestertonian, and a worshipper of He-Who-Is-Light-From-Light, the whole thing is just about as exciting and interesting and inspiring an idea as one could look for. (And then there's water. And food. But I mustn't get off topic.)

For example, I am told there are about 150 million rods and cones - the light-detection cells - in the human retina. However, I am also told there are only about ONE million neurons in the optic nerve. So, on the average, the signals from 150 detectors have to be funnelled down into just one message-carrying line. Hm. (I omit several pages of discussion, but if you want a bit more see here for another view.)

I am also told that it is possible, under the right conditions, for a person to sense as few as five photons - maybe even just one! I understand there are arrangements to handle the brightness and dimness, not only by changing the aperture (the size of the pupil) but by the "adaptation" of the various sensors themselves...

And then there's that thing about colour. Though we can hear well over nine octaves of different frequencies, we can see only a little less than an octave's worth of colours. But what a variety of colours there are! And how they affect each other - speaking of AMBER, the "amber waves" look lots more amber in front of those "purple mountain majesties" - so that means there's "colour-in-itself" but also "colour-in-its-neighbourhood"... The other sense of that word "colour" (the racial sense, or "Black" and "White") might make some uncomfortable, but in talking about the eye, we see their united and simultaneous importance: the eyeball is white to reflect extra light away, but behind the white (inside) is a deep black to absorb any stray light - all this, like every man-made camera - arranged so that the only light hitting the retina comes in as focussed by the lens, shuttered down by the iris, and aimed by the six wonderful opposing muscles...

Ahem. But for today, since we are trying to talk about GKC's Orthodoxy, I would like to consider the strange paradox that there are certain things we can see - things which appear to be the most tiny and subtle of sights, and yet are really among the most gigantic and vast things in existence. Oh, "science", you moan. Or (from the other side of the hall, or the brain) you scream "fairy-tales". Well - as you shall see in a future chapter, either you must have science or you must have fantasy. (Chestertonians have both...) You can say it is all magic, or you can say it is all physics. But you cannot ignore these things and go outdoors at night - who would dare? This may sound mystifying at the moment, but it is thoroughly in keeping with GKC's vignette we examined last week: the Man Who Discovered England. Today, we must go a step further in our adventure...

Click to read more, if you dare.
In the next, and last, little segment of GKC's "Introduction In Defence of Everything Else", he stresses that he is NOT trying to make jokes, riddles, paradoxes - he is not being "flippant" about what he is writing. So much of his writing has that flavour - one of the great detractors of GKC calls this "Verbal Fireworks" - pretty, noisy, soon over, and futile. But others will contend (as I do) that this is a secondary effect, deriving from his work on the primary material. As Falkor the Luck-Dragon states in The Neverending Story, "All the languages of joy are related." And so they are! When GKC begins to examine something, be it a doorknocker (in Lunacy and Letters) or a traffic light (called a "signal-box" in Heretics CW1:55) he pulls off the veil - the veil over the thing itself, or over his own eyes, and ours too - and suddenly it is seen in a whole new light. It stands revealed. We see it, and so we know it. This may be GKC the Good Magician:

It is true, of course, that marvels, even marvels of transformation, illustrate the noblest histories and traditions. But we should notice a rather curious difference which the instinct of popular legend has in almost all cases kept. The wonder-working done by good people, saints and friends of man, is almost always represented in the form of restoring things or people to their proper shapes.
[GKC ILN Nov 22 1913 CW29:588]

Or it may be GKC the Scientist:

If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for, and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.
[GKC The Thing CW3:167-8]

You will, I am sure, be puzzling over that last quote. Why does Doctor Thursday say he is talking about Science and then quote some nonsense about medieval mystics?

For a very good reason, O dear reader. Because one must be a mystic before one can hope to be a scientist. One must humble one's self before the universe, and take the needle - the rock, the plant, or the star - for what it is - if one is to know it for itself. Which is both the ancient meaning (Latin: scientia = knowledge) as well as the modern one, for Science. Why do I say "humble"? Because one removes one's self (one's thought, feelings, concerns, and, to the extent possible, even one's own senses) from the matter at hand, in order that one may find the truth of the thing.

What is the "thing", then, that GKC is going to look at, see, know, and ponder in this book? It is what he calls "orthodoxy" - which is used here in its old sense: Greek: straight/right/true opinion/judgement. (It is not tied to the thorny issue of primacy or ecclesial structure; this is not about Greek or Russian Orthodoxy; one might say it is the lower-case sense of the word.) He explains very carefully, in order that another sort of argument (or fist-fight) be prevented in advance:

When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed. [CW1:215]

He immediately follows this restriction of study with another, framed in a rather different manner, and well worth some study:

I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it. This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography. [Ibid., emphasis added]

If that last line were placed in more college textbooks and popular novels, we would perhaps be quite a bit further ahead - at least we would hear one truthful sentence. (You note that I've quoted it previously; indeed, all I can do is tell you my own thoughts about this book...)

But we have skipped a few paragraphs. GKC gives an alternative phrasing to his "Man Who Discovered England" parable. It is thoroughly Chestertonian, because he reveals that he once had hopes of having his own chapter in his previous book, but found he would not fit:

I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy..[CW1:214, emphasis added]

What a superb explanation.

You are perhaps still wondering about the dangling participle (oh, sorry; that's not what it is called) - the unresolved chord I left in my little prelude. You know - the thing that looks small but is really big? You may have guessed it already - I mean the stars. It is little wonder that the pagans worshipped the sun, they knew it gave light and warmth, was dramatic in its birth, glorious in its death - the right sense of this is fully supported by no less an authority than St. Francis of Assisi, who wrote:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.
["The Canticle of the Creatures"]

It is nearly beyond belief, in an almost ridiculous extravagance of fantasy, to go out at night and try to affirm that all those tiny pinpoints of light (points where the angels dance?) are really and truly utterly gigantic nuclear furnaces of terrible power and glory. (Yes, I am sure that's the dance the angels do...) Yes. It is time to begin our looking, our study, our observation:

"Treading fearfully amid the growing fingers of the earth, I raised my eyes, and at the next moment shut them, as at a blow. High in the empty air blazed and streamed a great fire, which burnt and blinded me every time I raised my eyes to it. I have lived many years now under this meteor of a fixed Apocalypse, but I have never survived the feelings of that moment. Men eat and drink, buy and sell, marry, are given in marriage, and all the time there is something in the sky at which they cannot look. They must be very brave."
["A Crazy Tale" CW14:70]

But then - as we shall hear GKC shortly tell us, "The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid." [CW1:231] But then that is how science works.

And if, perhaps, in that line you hear an echo of St. Paul: "Christ Jesus in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" [Col 2:3, emphasis added] you will begin to realize just how wonderful this adventure is - and to WHOM it will lead: "But unto you that fear My Name, the Sun of justice shall arise..." [Mal 4:2]

--Dr. Thursday

PS That last bit brings up another one of those odd phrases we bounce around in Chestertonia: "The question about 'Home' is to be asked with Who, not What or Where."

Chesterton at Ave Maria

I had the opportunity to visit Ave Maria University's campus yesterday, and wandered over to the book store.

I was impressed by the large number of Chesterton titles they had there. They looked like a distributor for Ignatius Press ;-).

I'm glad this educational institution has seen the wisdom of studying the works of the great GKC.

Another way to reach More Chesterton Audio

From Ryan:
I've posted some links to more Chesterton audio here.

Just thought you'd like to know.

God Bless,
Ryan
Sonitus Sanctus

More Chesterton Audio

Update!!!

GKCleveland now has 11 G.K. Chesterton audio-essay readings up on the net.

They can be downloaded for FREE here.

Nine of these same essays can be found at this site.

Please feel free to link to these sites (or spread the news in some strange manner).

Thank you
Matthew Lewis
GKCleveland

Lent

What does it mean? Will you give up something? Add something to your spiritual routine? How will we prepare for Easter?

On Ash Wednesday, I was paradoxically at a Disney park in Florida. It was an odd day for fasting and abstinence (from meat). Standing in line for a park ride, we observed several people with ashy crosses on their foreheads, and felt a certain sense of communion with them. As we fasted, we noticed that there was food offered everywhere, to satisfy every whim.

But we also noticed that even in a place like that, one truly could fast. And think about fasting, in a different way than in a living room or office devoid of temptations.

As we choose something this lent, let's try to choose something other than what would be healthy for us anyway (no desserts or seconds, giving up chocolate) and think about what we can do that would be a true sacrifice. Many bloggers give up blogging. Sometimes that's about making room for other things, sometimes its about breaking an addiction, sometimes its about taking a breather from it. Maybe it is a true sacrifice for some people.

A true sacrifice. What is that? Let's contemplate that as the Lenten season begins.

And if you haven't read this yes, I do recommend it.

Thursday's Dr. Thursday Post

A Voyage to Something Wonderful, and Giraffes

"Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed."
[GKC, Introduction to The Defendant]

We have begun Lent, where we remember our mortality, and the strange good news about how a man died. It seems so soon after Christmas, as indeed this year's spring full moon comes very early - so you will not mind my paraphrasing a Christmas story:

Jesus was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The centurion stuck his spear into his side, and Pilate released his body for burial.

Jesus was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Jesus was as dead as a door-nail.

There is no doubt that Jesus was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Have you ever thought about it that way? Save this for Good Friday and try reading it for three days running. You'll see.

Something wonderful did come of that story. Something called "good news".

And somehow, this attitude - which I have tried to give you a taste of, by mutilating Dickens - is the essence of GKC's great Orthodoxy which we are considering at present. (Note! We are not proceeding into the matter of that Dead Man - not today. We'll get there at the right point.)

But what's this about a voyage? Do you really want to know? It's dangerous, and you may not come back unchanged...
Read more.

As I pointed out previously, we are trying to work through the experience of a certain man - Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a writer who called himself a journalist - and the thoughts of that man as he proceeded to find out that something he had "always" known was actually something fresh, startling, and utterly new.

This is hard to do. GKC himself found it hard to express. He spent quite a lot of time talking about it, and used "parables" - or analogies, or suggestions - to try to get this idea across, conjuring up example after example, ridiculous fantasy upon ridiculous fantasy.... To communicate what? Not the weighty ideas of the Kingdom of God - nothing that sublime, at least not for the present. Just the idea that the world (the kosmos, if we might be so bold and Greek) - yes, with humans, with newspapers, with pens and paper, with telephones and fireplaces, with beer and bacon, babies and burials - all this can be seen as something wonderful. (We need that song from "The King and I" here.) "Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed." What does that mean? It means we can recover our sense of the Truth of All That Is, the splendid freshness of seeing things for the first time, if we will but "change our eyes"...

This is not easy to do. It is not even easy to get this idea across. (Look how much trouble I am having!) The biggest problem is getting people's attention - and then keeping it.

Here's another, earlier, attempt from GKC:

The merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art, though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life for interest with the same kind of cheerful and uneradicable assurance with which we look for interest at a comedy for which we have paid money at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured picture, the scrawlings in circles of a baby upon the slate of night; its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a cockney brilliancy, like the holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level, they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man - the taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of 110 in South Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip.

When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always supposed to be, for his benefit; but in the fact that an unusually large whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralized with the mere indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and splendid disinterestedness of the reader of Pearson's Weekly. He still keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of men - the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and, with a truly sportsmanlike instinct, the average man takes most pleasure in the details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the werewolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature, a refuge indicating the dulness of the world: it was an incident pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.
[GKC, "A Defence of Useful Information", The Defendant]

Ah - did you stumble over "navvy" there? A navvy is a British term meaning "labourer employed in excavation". Then there was another term people persist in stumbling over - this "dragon" thing, as if there was something wrong in it. They've missed the strange truth GKC is getting at. I hesitate to use this next quote, because it makes me laugh... every time GKC uses this certain word, you almost KNOW he's trying to get our attention - but then that's my purpose too. OK, here you go:

"When first the giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie. Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie.
[GKC ILN Oct. 21, 1911 CW29:176, emphasis added]

But there really areflying dragons, webbed lizards of the genus Draco found in the East Indies, and I have recently learned that another real thing called dragon's blood (which comes from plants, not lizards) has several uses - perhaps as many as twelve - but I'm waiting to hear from a traveller. Hee hee.

Alas. If we are to "change our eyes" we shall most likely look rather odd, even as we find everything else to begin to look odd. But it is worth looking a fool, if we are to recover the splendid vision of the New. (We shall hear more about this strange "looking like a fool" if we ever get to chapter 2.) But how to do this? Go off, like Bilbo, on an adventure? Nasty inconvenient things - we might find dragons! "A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs." [GKC, Heretics CW1:72] Or is it that you'll find it inconvenient? But: "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." [GKC, ILN July 21 1906 CW27:242] Ah, I see, that's what is keeping you. Very well; I can remove all that, if you will just come along... yes, through the screen, that's right. Climb right in. It won't hurt, and although I must, by the rules of my own craft, use magic, I guarantee that I will use nothing more harmful than what you are already using in order to read my words today. Dangerous, to be sure, in the wrong hands - but then that's the magic of the Keys. OK! Here we go...

Let us, then, set off on a voyage of discovery. What shall we take? Let us consult one of the Great Works of Travel - I mean something by Jules Verne, say Journey to the Center of the Earth - so let us collect our handkerchiefs, our provisions, our clothes and bedding, our lights, our climbing gear, our ropes (forgotten by poor Sam Gamgee, but restored to him in Lorien!) and all the scientific equipment we may need - we are hoping to make discoveries, after all. We are off, with GKC - OH WHAT FUN IT SHALL BE! - on a journey to adventure!!!

Having met with Uncle Gilbert at his old digs in Battersea, we get into a boat, set forth down the Thames, and travel, lo, many days, through the mist and fog. Terrible storms rise up, and we lose all sense of direction - but our vessel is seaworthy and we fight through long nights of terror, to a bright sunrise and a clear sky, with our lives and all our stores intact. Bacon and eggs are frying, coffee and tea are ready. Toast has been made, jam is set out, and we break our fast... "Land Ho!" our lookout cries! We are thrilled beyond words, as at 2 AM that October morning in 1492, the great thrill pervaded the crew of three little ships... But as little as they do WE know - we are about to discover something even more wonderful than an entire unknown hemisphere.

Our hardy crew brings us to a safe harbour on an empty beach, amid rocks and sand. We climb out and make our way up above the beach - where something strange meets our eye:

We stare, blinking, in the early sunlight. What is this? A church? A house? Could this be some alien teleportation device? Some recently built set for a soon-to-be-released Hollywood flick? Some seaside getaway for a wealthy recluse? Maybe even a barbaric temple? How curious it is! We are fascinated, and wish to come closer, to study it and admire it.... We might learn so much from it! But - do we have any clue where we are? The storm has taken us so far from home, our compass (as for the Earth-Center journeyers) has been misbehaving for days... But hark! Is that - is that someone - another human? A native of this strange place? He approaches! How might we begin to make ourselves known to him? God only knows what strange tongue he speaks. We begin, with simple hand motions, hoping to convey our friendly harmlessness and our wishes to approach the strange structure we see before us.

His mouth opens and we wonder what this foreign human voice shall say...

"Look 'ere, you crazy lot! Goggling at ol' Brighton Pavilion like you've never seen 'er before? Lot of escaped lunatics, if you arsk me. Gar, I'm thirsty. Stand me a drink?"

We look at each other, our faces twisted with shock. We find we are back in England - on the south coast - at Brighton! That strange building is none other than the Brighton Pavilion built in 1784 and later revised into this oriental palace. This uncouth alien is just a common English navvy (see above) taking some sea air before going to his work.

Dullards? Fools? Escaped lunatics? Nitwits? Time-wasters? Simpletons?

No, we have done something far more important than Columbus, found something more powerful than Newton, Maxwell, or Einstein, experienced a communication from far further than Morse, Bell, or Marconi... One might write a whole chapter about the important work we have just accomplished. [See, e.g., "The Round Road; Or, The Desertion Charge" in Manalive or "The Desert Island" in The Ball and the Cross, or "The Coloured Lands" in The Coloured Lands. But especially CW1:211 and CW2:143]

You and I and GKC - we have discovered England. (From afar we hear someone shout, stop the presses!)

No, we have found Eden again. For one tiny moment, the Divine Voice has spoken: ephpheta - only this time our eyes have been opened. (cf. Mark 7:34)

This is what shall come in the remainder of the book. Your eyes will be opened. You will discover the place where you live, and see it as you saw it that first day; you shall hear the things you know as if you had heard them for the first time. You will find Good News.

Oh my friend! Come! The tide is about to turn! The wind is fresh, the sky clear! Get your gear ready, and set off with us, for the voyage has begun!

--Dr. Thursday

2008 Conference Planning

Sean has conference info on his blog.

At a High School Somewhere in the Midwest....

I got an e-mail recently from a high school teacher who told me that for a break in his logic classes, he was having the students write Triolets and Clerihews.

I think that's pretty cool, don't you?

New Chesterton AudioBook: Heretics

Got this note from Ryan:

I've posted some links to a just-completed audio version of Chesterton's Heretics:

Thanks, Ryan!

Answering Lunacy (or Letters)

There was a letter to the editor in the latest Gilbert magazine which I feel the need to respond to and I'm going to do it here.

The person implied that because the Harry Potter books seemed to her to endorse assisted suicide, she could not see how anyone could find them "Christian" as some people claim of the Harry Potter books.

I should very much like to know what type of fiction this letter writer does like to read.

If she reads mysteries, for example, quite often there is a murder, robbery or some such crime committed. The detective then solves the crime. Since Christians know that murder and robbery go against certain commandments, should they read mysteries?

If she reads the Bible, she must know that there is murder, robbery, adultery, suicide, and a whole host of other crimes and sins committed there. Should a Christian read the Bible?

If she reads novels of any sort, there are usually people who have problems and sin in various ways. Novels generally revolve around someone becoming aware of their sins and repenting, or perhaps being consigned to hell. Should a Christian read novels at all?

The criticism of Harry Potter that it condones assisted suicide is about as silly as criticizing Father Brown for investigating murders. In both cases, it is quite clear that certain behaviors are good, while others lead to a life of ruin, and perhaps even damnation.

I find the criticism that Harry Potter is bad because it contains people sinning is off base. Last time I checked, we all sin, and that's pretty much the human story, in real life, as well as in fictional life.

Sean's Hernia Update

Timothy Jones' Blog: Old World Swine

Mentioned in the Tremendous Trifles column of the latest Gilbert magazine, (although the address didn't work for me, here it the right one), Mr. Jones has a new blog. Mrs. Jones and I (Mrs. Brown) should get together some time and talk about our maiden names. ;-)