More Information on the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Annual Conference

Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association
Annual Conference October 30 - November 2, 2008
Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
Sheraton Fallsview Hotel & Conference Center
6755 Fallsview Boulevard. Niagara Falls, Ontario L2G 3W7, Canada
Phone: (905) 374-1077

For conference Information: www.mapacagazette.net

Looking for Some Chestertonian Presenters

As some of you may recall, Jill presented a paper to us at the Chesterton Conference about two years ago, a fascinating look at Dickens's Dombey through a Chestertonian point of view.

Jill has a request:

I have the wonderful and unique opportunity of bringing our friend, GKC, to the forefront at the 2008 MAPACA conference (Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association). After presenting a Tolkien/Chesterton paper there (a largely secular and postmodern arena) last year, I was asked many positive questions about Chesterton, enough that the panel chair suggested that I propose a panel for 2008. Happily, with the support my friend, professor Bill Mistichelli from Penn State/Abington, and God's help, my proposal was accepted.

Now, the important thing is for me to have abstracts for papers. In order for the panel to exist, I will need to have 3-4 presenters, and this is where I really need your help,. If there is any way for you to spread the word, I would so appreciate it. Below, I am including my specific panel proposal and contact info. And you will find the general Call for Papers for the MAPACA conference (Ed. note: I can't include it all here, but if you are interested, email me). There will be found all the details of the conference itself. You'll note there that Bill annually chairs a session on Tolkien and Lewis, one in which acquaintances of yours may also be very interested.

On Bill's suggestion, too, I just sent a similar proposal for the NEMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) conference in 2009. I'm all for letting GKC do his magic in all of these places so sorely in need of his common sense!

Thanks for your help. God bless.
Jill
Details: Click here.
G. K. Chesterton, certainly one of the most voluminous writers of the early twentieth century, was well-known for his work as a literary and social critic, a novelist, a poet, and Catholic apologist. As a forerunner of the reawakening of Chesterton interest, Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, refers to G. K. Chesterton as “the apostle of common sense,” for he was a man eager to shepherd the people of his time, a heyday of secular humanism and the rise of postmodernism. His gifted use of paradox has the unique ability to evoke smiles and awaken faith. His famous debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells created an intense but friendly and respectful forum for discussion of opposing views on science, materialism, and religion. Without doubt, Chesterton can engage equally well in such discussions with thinkers of our day.

In his literary criticism, Chesterton salutes those Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens, who so clearly delineate between good and evil, promote the necessity for social and moral change, and portray the joy ever-present in the company of absolute truths. These same values are evident in his apologetic works, such as Orthodoxy, and his fiction, such as The Man Who Was Thursday. Such literary contributions bestow us with lifelong gifts, for in the early 20th Century, they supported and encouraged the enormously influential works of, among others, C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien. Indeed, Chesterton's work enthusiastically encourages dialogue across centuries. This Chesterton panel eagerly invites proposals for papers of comparative literature as well as those of social and cultural commentary.

Looking for a Game of Gype? Head to London!

I received this from Holly:

I'm writing from the Hide and Seek festival; we have monthly events in London where we play interesting games, and on 10 May we're going to be running a night of Chesterton-influenced and inspired games at BAC (the Battersea Arts Centre, not far from where Chesterton lived in Battersea).

We're always keen to have new designers and players, and I wondered whether any of your London-based readers might be interested in running a game at the event. We're keen on pretty much any type of game or playful activity: grown-up versions of playground games, games where the players work together to create something, scavenger hunts, quiet card games, anything that involves the overlap of games and other art forms, and just general exciting stuff along the lines of the Adventure and Romance Agency from Chesterton's "Club of Queer Trades". There's a little more information about it here and on the rest of the website, but anyone who's interested can contact me.

If you think your readers might be interested, I'd be grateful if you could pass the information on to them.

Regards, Holly

Doesn't this make you wish you lived near Battersea?

Dr. Thursday's Post

Thanks again to Dr. Thursday for this hilarious post.

Rolling the other way: all chairs - or all camels?

Last week I omitted a warning I used several times previously. I did not mention that GKC was using "evolution" as an example - a rapid, en passant kind of example. I did so because I think it was well worth stopping to see what we were able to see in the brilliant light GKC provided. We have learned something almost NO other writer in the last century has been able to attain - an approach to true Scholastic thought, applied to one of the most pesty of issues. Alas for the scientists, and alas-squared for the philosophers, if that's what they still call themselves, who have not yet read GKC, and taken his writing to heart!

Now, we resume - and we find in front of us yet another chasm, shaped quite remarkably like last week's. But where evolution makes all things the same thing (or a flux and nothing more besides), this is the opposite. This is another failure to see things as they are - but now to see no degree of similarity of any kind.

But this time, instead of provoking thought, or anger, or boredom, I think this will provoke laughter. Actually, I laughed a good bit about last week's posting, and since then as well; I read some really strong comments in Fr. Jaki's The Road of Science and the Ways to God which made evolution seem... ah well but we must go on. Please finish your drinks and let us proceed...
Click here to read on.

GKC goes from one error of modern thought to another, shining light into the dark corners...

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H. G. Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."
[CW1:238]

Are your chairs quite different? Hee hee. If you have read GKC's earlier book, Heretics you may perhaps recall that we've heard something like this before. But it's lots funnier:

...it is a very common phrase of modern intellectualism to say that the morality of one age can be entirely different to the morality of another. And like a great many other phrases of modern intellectualism, it means literally nothing at all. If the two moralities are entirely different, why do you call them both moralities? It is as if a man said, "Camels in various places are totally diverse; some have six legs, some have none, some have scales, some have feathers, some have horns, some have wings, some are green, some are triangular. There is no point which they have in common." The ordinary man of sense would reply, "Then what makes you call them all camels? What do you mean by a camel? How do you know a camel when you see one?"
[GKC Heretics CW1:167]

Some of you may be thinking this has something to do with evolution (it does, but probably not in the way you're thinking!) But animals can be fun, as well as dangerous, again, not in the way you are probably thinking. Let GKC explain:

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.
[ILN Jan 4 1908, CW28:21 - another 100 year old quote!]

Which reminds me of GKC's very hilarious view about giraffes:

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.
[ILN Oct 21 1911 CW29:176]

Or this:

A man can coil a snake round and round inside his hat, though only a few individuals have indulged in this form of nature-study. If a man were to attempt to fold up a giraffe, or even to deal in this manner with the most compact or collapsible horse or dog, he would find that they were not sufficiently articulated animals.
[ILN July 25 1931 CW35:561]

I bother you with this nonsense because our good long-necked friend shall appear again in a little while, unless of course he has evolved into something else by then. Hee hee.

Ahem. But this is getting into something quite serious. The correct philosophical term is "universals" - the idea of something (and idea such as a quality like green or tall, or a category of thing, like chair or camel) which is common to various real (existing) things... Please remember what path we are on: the Suicide of Thought - the modern crimes which are attempting to destroy, prevent and eliminate thought. Let us hear the next bit, then:

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for instance, "What is right in one age is wrong in another." This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? 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. It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress.
[CW1:238-9]

Pigs! Another animal, but I must stop here. No; I shall give the linking quite which unites this last thought to his previous work:

...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.
[Heretics CW1:117]

Make sure you select a stable means of measurement, or you'll never know if you are rolling, unrolling, or re-rolling - or just staying in one place. It may take all your running - as the Queen told Alice - to stay in one place - but sometimes you need to do it.

--Dr. Thursday

Emphasis by the editor, who sees connections there to the current political campaign.

Links to Orthodoxy

Just in time to celebrate its 100th anniversary, Ryan at Catholic Audio has announced a page of links, including audio Orthodoxy, chapter by chapter. Put this in your iPods and smoke it. (Pardon my old-fashioned expression.)

Thanks, Ryan.

In case your readers are not aware already, there exists a monthly based on Chesterton in Madrid, Spain. This publication is called "Chesterton" and is a magazine dedicated to current analysis based on Chesterton's common sense.

Thanks to reader: Rich

New Chesterton and Belloc Books at Loome

I just saw that Loome got in a BUNCH of GKC and Belloc books....

Thanks to blog reader: Peter

YouTube: Orson Wells's The Man Who Was Thursday

Hi Nancy,

Thought you would be interested to know that someone has posted Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre adaption of "The Man Who Was Thursday" on youtube. Here is a link to part 1 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyHoT1oa0j4&feature=related

Thanks to: Mary B.

Anti-subsidiarity in Action

We are in Austin, TX, setting up an art show yesterday. We've been doing art shows for 11 years and have done over 300. This was the most unorganized set up ever.

Although, God did provide us with an absolutely gorgeous day to sit around and wait in, which we thanked Him for many times.

And, the long wait, which began at 1PM and ended with us finally getting to bed at midnight, also allowed us to see one of Austin's most unusual tourist attractions. We saw the bats. We were waiting on a bridge that was only one bridge down river from the "Bat" bridge.

The reason this art set up was so anti-subsidiarity was because the people setting up seemed to be working under the assumption that we artists didn't know how to set up, and we needed their help.

The art show also seemed to assume that if given the option, we artists wouldn't understand where to go or how to park our vans and trucks so that the maximum number of people could set up at the same time. So they organized us. And it took forever.

But we are set up, albeit tired, and the show begins today. If we have weather like yesterday, I think we'll all be happy.

Have a great weekend, and if you live near Austin, come by and see us, ok y'all? (that's Texas talk ;-))

New Blogzine Announced: World of Forms

My name is James Hoskins and I've created a new blogzine called "World of Forms." It combines two things that I, and I'm sure several of you, are quite passionate about: Art and Philosophy. Anyone who is a fan of music, art, film, literature, and/or philosophy will, I think, enjoy the articles at http://worldofforms.net.

I'm also an avid lover of G.K. Chesterton and frequently quote him (or blatantly rip him off) in my articles. The reason I'm sending this email is because I want to build relationships with other like-minded people and associations. I would love for anyone at the American Chesterton Society Blog to link to http://worldofforms.net, or maybe even mention it in a blog. It would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks James

Dr. Thursday's Post

Unrolling: the Truth

We ended last week's leg of our journey with talk about a bridge... some very serious talk.

It is now time for us to screw up our courage to the sticking point, as we face the steep, narrow path ... the yawning chasm... the fearful abyss... the danger...

Yes, for the topic today is among the most debated, most boring, most important, most feared, most confusing, and most fight-provoking of topics...

But there is also a bridge. Click to read more here.

The topic is one word: EVOLUTION.

The issue is (according to SOME) exactly that war between faith and reason. Is there a God? Is there design? Is there science? What am I? What is Man? Is evolution a theory? What is a theory? And so on.

I find some of it very boring, because it is always the same tired words, never clear, never precise.. but more to the point, never quoting Chesterton, who has it phrased so well!

Father Stanley Jaki, the great historian of science, author of some 50 books, calls GKC the "Critic of Evolutionism" in his little study Chesterton A Seer of Science - one of its four short chapters examines why. But even more, this simple title clarifies the matter for us - and settles us boldly down the path.

The distinction, you see, is between Evolution (as a science) and EvolutionISM (a philosophy).

You see the chasm? The terror of the abyss which divides the various fields of human thought! And our path leads across it?

But I promised a bridge. Chesterton, like Aquinas, "has thrown out a bridge across the abyss of the first doubt, and found reality beyond and begun to build on it." [St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:543]


The abyss is easily seen, the fear is intense. Let us look at the bridge, then, and gain confidence.

Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about. But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful. In some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is generally called evolution.

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."
[CW1:237-8]

The scholastics, for whom argument meant Pursuit of Truth, used a tool called "distinguo" = "I Distinguish." In order to study something they considered it according to similarity, but even more, according to DIFFERENCE.

So does GKC.

Read those words again. IF IT IS ANYTHING MORE...

You see, there are TWO things here, hiding in that word "evolution" (which is just Latin for "unrolling"). Yes, once you've recovered from your acrophobic spasm, you can look and see there really are two chasms here.

(the word I wanted was "rapture of the heights" but perhaps better that I left it out.)

One is the error being made by the scientists. They think they can stop being philosophers - which means being WHOLE men - while they do their biology. No physicist ever says "Ah, what a pleasant day. I think I could go for a bit of measurement, maybe a length, a velocity, or something fun. Yes, I am going to do some physics now. So I shall by no means do any mathematics. That would be to abandon my field, and I must be a TRUE physicist."

What a loon.

Well, by no means can a biologist STOP DOING philosophy while he is doing his biology. The error is quite widespread; GKC wrote about this for most of the last chapter. But some 50 years before GKC wrote Orthodoxy Cardinal Newman was saying the same thing:

The human mind cannot keep from speculating and systematizing; and if [some field] is not allowed to occupy its own territory, adjacent sciences, nay, sciences which are quite foreign to [that field], will take possession of it. And this occupation is proved to be a usurpation by this circumstance, that these foreign sciences will assume certain principles as true, and act upon them, which they neither have authority to lay down themselves, nor appeal to any other higher science to lay down for them.
[Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse IV]

Ah. See those strong cables, those mighty foundations? We are reassured. The chasm does not bother us at all.

Then there is that second chasm - the one where the philosophers play a game, trying to pretend that there cannot be a science at all. Newman's warning applies just as well here, but I shall give another example for you.

Some centuries ago, people believed that the "heavens" (that is, the stuff you see above you when you are outdoors) were "divine" - or at least somehow "holy". It was not possible to "explain" them by means of the tools of earth - that is, terrestrial mechanics. (I hear some people yelling "Galileo" and "Newton" - but that does not explain anything at all. We're not talking about science yet.) You see, even to this very day, in 2008 there are people who REFUSE to believe certain truths about reality, because their religion, er, I ought to say, their PHILOSOPHY forbids them to believe it.

And since the forbidding is from a Philosophy (you can read "religion" here if you like), the freeing or the granting of access, must also occur within that same realm, or it cannot "take hold".

That is what happened back in the 13th century, when the truth we proclaim every Sunday: "Credo... in unum Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum" - I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ only-begotten Son of God - was brought to bear on the matter. The heavens could not be divine, because Jesus was the Only-begotten - and not the heavens, as the Greeks taught. The really serious work anticipated Newton by several hundred years:

The Aristotelian dichotomy between superlunary and sublunary matter was dealt a decisive blow, and the unitary approach of classical physics to earthly and heavenly bodies was foreshadowed, when Buridan, inspired by his faith, discussed the substance of stars in a manner which patently deprived them of the divine and imperishable characteristics which Aristotle attributed to them.
[Jaki, Science and Creation chapter 10]

Indeed! If you want to explain the birth of modern science, you must look to a CREED which freed us from a wrongful belief. ("Reason itself is a matter of faith" - we heard that last week, didn't we?)

The heavens are NOT divine. They may use their own laws, or they may use "terrestrial" laws - but at least for CHRISTIAN philosophers, there is NOTHING which prevents "science" from exploring them with even earthly tools.

It's even funnier to think, as one glances through the history of science, how scientists found something strange in the sun which had NEVER been found on earth.... WAS THIS A COUNTER-EXAMPLE? Oh, no. It was first found in the sun, but you can buy it in the store... they called it after the Greek word for "sun" but now you can get helium in a balloon.

Then there's that strange weird blue color, again something apparently impossible on earth - scientists used the word "forbidden" - and called the substance "nebulium" - but it proved to be nothing more than oxygen, in an extremely ionised state, possible only in VERY empty space.

One more example, to bring us back to earth. The scientists of maybe two centuries ago thought that the physical substances which exist in LIVING things were somehow FORMALLY different from those in NON-living things. They used the word "organic" to mean those which came from life (from organisms), and "inorganic" for rocks, rivers, and the rest of things.

Until 1829 when a German chemist named Wöhler produced something called "urea" (yes, it sounds like "urine" where it is found) - but he did it in the lab, in glassware, from non-living (inorganic) compounds. (It caused quite a bit of war; see Jaki's The Relevance of Physics chapter 11 for the hilarious whining about this!)

That brought about (or at least began, or provided the possibility of beginning) the junction of two disciplines, which henceforth had a new hallway joining them: biology and chemistry. So now we have biochemistry, molecular biology, and whole departments of sub-disciplines.

Now, let us turn to that other chasm. And here I shall for once speak about my own experience. The SAME thing is happening (has been happening) between biology and computing. I do NOT mean that computers are helping to do searches in DNA sequences. I mean that the question of DESIGN, invoked or opposed, belongs at least in part to computing, where the idea of a thing-which-specifies-the-building-of-a-thing is a way of life. (We computer people call them "compilers"; without them we are cooks without kitchens, utensils, and ingredients.)

The ribosome is the machine of the living cell which makes proteins. But its code exists in the DNA. A ribosome is able to build the parts for new ribosomes, because it is given (1) the recipe or blueprints and (2) the raw materials. A compiler can produce another compiler, provided... Ah - the bridge! (I was going to say "the Surprise"... hee hee!)

But in just about any of the daily whine about "evolution" you will NOT hear the real matters being explored - you will only hear the boring stuff as the children fight.

Enter GKC. And, like Aquinas, with a blow on the table, he divided the science from the philosophy. Read it again. Yes - "stingless for the most orthodox" - isn't that a GREAT phrase? Learn it; learn these paragraphs. GKC gives us the bridge by which we cross those chasms and safely arrive on the other side.

The whiners, scared, silly, little ones that they are, are left behind, and we advance.

--Dr. Thursday

P.S. Yes, evolution is a science inasmuch as it measures something real: the relation between a living being and its offspring. That is all. The obedient Mendel, the monk, ought to be its patron saint - not Darwin the cagey secretive God-basher. Oh, yes; he had another, non-scientific, purpose, which he kept hidden; see e.g. Jaki's The Purpose of It All for more. And talk about purpose? Can there be such a thing? Will your purpose now be to post a comment arguing against it? How odd. I could quote GKC: "No sceptics work sceptically; no fatalists work fatalistically; all without exception work on the principle that it is possible to assume what it is not possible to believe." (CW2:542) but here's an even more curious version: “Those who devote their lives to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose, constitute an interesting subject for study.” [A. N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason, 1929]

One more thing. If you'd like to know more about the relation between compilers and ribosomes, please ask. I do hope to write about it someday. It will be lots of fun, and very Chestertonian.

GKC on NYC

Why he will never visit.

Chesterton Lecture Tonight in Lisle, IL

Oxford lecturer, Dominican scholar headlines ‘Theology in Life’ lecture
April 9th 5:00 pm Birk 112 Click here to read the whole press release.

Lisle, Illinois ~ George [sic!] Keith “G.K.” Chesterton was a prolific English critic and author of verse, essays, novels and short stories.

Chesterton ranked with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells among the most celebrated writers of his time. He is probably best known for his series about the priest-detective Father Brown who appeared in 50 stories. Between 1900 and 1936, Chesterton published some 100 books.

But after converting from Anglican in 1922, Chesterton’s energy turned toward defending Catholicism. Chesterton argued against all the trends that eventually took over the 20th century: materialism, scientific determinism, moral relativism and agnosticism. He also argued that socialism and capitalism are enemies of freedom and justice in modern society.

“G.K. Chesterton’s Discovery of Metaphysical Realism” is the topic of a lecture that will be presented by Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., a renowned theologian, author and John Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer at the University of Oxford, at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9 in the Krasa Center Presentation Room.

The lecture is the first in a series at Benedictine University titled “Theology in Life” which focuses on theology for lay people and how they can relate that theology to their lives in the workplace, civil society, political society and family.

In his lecture on Chesterton and metaphysical realism, Nichols will highlight the interdisciplinary nature of Catholic intellectual life which recognizes the importance of faith and reason. Metaphysical realism is a philosophical cornerstone of Catholic thinking.

The lecture is also about Chesterton, a man known as a writer and journalist, who took his faith to the marketplace and defended it with wit, reason and humor.

Finally, Nichols will discuss how divine revelation emerges in human experience and thought, manifesting truth, goodness and beauty.

Nichols was born in 1948 at Lytham St. Anne's, England and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Oxford University. He entered the Dominican order in 1970 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1976. He has lectured at Cambridge University and was the Robert Randall Distinguished Professor in Christian Culture at Providence College (Rhode Island).

In 2003, the Master of the Order of Preacher (Dominicans) conferred the degree “Sacrae Theologiae Magister” (Master of Sacred Theology) on Nichols. The Master of Sacred Theology is the highest canonical degree in theology.

The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies at Benedictine University and St. Procopius Abbey. It is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Christine M. Fletcher, Ph.D, at (630) 829-6263 or by email at cfletcher@ben.edu.

Benedictine University is an independent Roman Catholic institution located in Lisle, Illinois just 25 miles west of Chicago. Founded in 1887, Benedictine provides 45 undergraduate majors, 11 graduate programs,a Ph.D. in Organization Development and an Ed.D. in Higher Education and Organizational Change.
Benedictine University is ranked as a Top School in the Midwest for Master’s Universities, sixth in Illinois for Ethnic Diversity, and as a Top Campus for International Students, Economic Diversity and Highest Graduation Rate for 2008 by U.S. News & World Report.

Texas!

Tomorrow, we are leaving for Texas. We'll be visiting the capitol city of Austin, to do the Art City Austin this weekend. Next weekend, we'll be at Main Street Fort Worth.

I'll have a variety of internet connections while I'm on the road, so I may post, and I may not, depending.

If you live in either Austin or Dallas/Fort Worth, please come and see us.

WikiQuote Page of Chesterton Quotes

WikiQuote is new but growing fast. Someone has put up a lot of Chesterton quotes, which have hopefully been cross referenced to our big guy's writings.

H/T David.

Seton Hall Lecture I Wish I Could Attend

A New Distributist League is forming

This news from our friends at ChesterBelloc Mandate:

Distributism in Action

As John Médaille from The Distributist Review pointed out recently, various new endeavors are in preparation for the coming year.
We hinted in the past about a future conference. Now we are working in earnest to secure a site and date for the event. This will be a full day conference with eight speakers who have generously offered their time and support. Please return to our site for updates as developments unfold.
A Grassroots Movement Rising…Again
The original Distributist League initially met at the Devereux pub and spawned 24 like-minded branches across Great Britain within a single year.* These in turn hosted lectures and conferences, and coordinated with complimentary organizations such as Fr. McQuillan's Catholic Land Association.
In recent years, many have made efforts to re-introduce Distributism and, as a result, discussions surrounding the topic have been increasing on the world-wide-web. These consequences are not negligible. Book publishers, online and print journals, lectures, universities, and television programs have either touched on the topic or have dedicated themselves to it.
Short-term Goals
We would like to notify our readers of the following proposed objectives we will meet:
1. The establishment of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization to educate society about and in support of Distributism. This apostolate will engage in the dissemination of educational materials, semi-annual lecture series, and conferences.
2. A chronicle in print is in development with the intent of discussing solutions to our current global dilemmas. Conceptually the magazine will concentrate on both the practical application of Distributism, as well as analysis of various movements conformes with Distributist thought. This journal will include some of the writers featured on our online archive and debates with capitalists and socialists will also be welcome.
3. Fund-raising will play a supporting role towards keeping our costs down for events and all materials. All profits will be used toward our described efforts.
You Can Have an Impact
Send us an email and let us know whether you would like to be contacted with updates and information about said events. We will not release your information to any third parties and you will not have to provide your name if you desire not to do so. Just send us an email that you wish to subscribe and please provide us with your country of residence, city and state/province. This will assist us when preparing future events.
Ultimately we would like to lecture across the globe, so please support this effort by being a part of the mailing list
Establishing a database will allow us to quantify the existing support for these ventures, and inform our readers when and where they will take place.
Please contact us at:
societyfordistributism@gmail.com **
Country of residence:
City:
State/Province:
Sending us your information will be invaluable in our efforts to coordinate these goals
Servire Deo Regnare Est!

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The ChesterBelloc Mandate
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Dr. Thursday's Post

The Peril - and a Bridge into Light

We ended last week, smack in the Octave of Easter (the week of eight Sundays!) with a real cliffhanger:

...there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.
[CW1:236]

And I am sure everyone was wondering what that peril is. Good. So you can wonder just a little more, but you are about to find out - if you dare.

We are coming to the first really serious peak in our "study" (that is a pompous term for my boisterous and lengthy meanderings) of GKC's centennial book, Orthodoxy. We had a couple of weeks where we made a slight detour for the sake of the season - so just in case you let it slide and want to catch up, you ought to read (or re-read!) Chapter III called "The Suicide of Thought" - up to the paragraph end I have just quoted.

Very well. All ready to resume the hike? Good. As Hans the guide called out, "Forüt!" - "Forward!" (That's from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, in case you've forgotten... we aren't going there today. Sorry. That leaves from Iceland in late June - wanna go?) Ahem.

What, then, is this peril? Actually, we were told about it, a paragraph or two ago:

The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.[CW1:235]

Yes, please read that again. These times are dark. Few things have been darker, been more misnamed than "the Enlightenment". These times, NOT the 13th century, are the Dark Ages. These times are emphatically NOT the "Age of Reason". You can find this discussed elsewhere; the philosophers, if any still are with us, must now go stand in the corner, for they have refused to help. But GKC is here, with light, with weapons, with truth... (Compare these with Milo's gifts in The Phantom Tollbooth - a book which in so many ways hints at the same things GKC tells us!)

So what is the peril? Summon all your courage, and read on - when you dare.

"That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself." [CW1:236]

Yes. You can, if you choose, think yourself into a state where you can no longer think. No alcohol, no drugs; nothing like that. You read the wrong books, listen to the wrong music, watch the wrong TV shows, visit the wrong web-sites... and Poof.

Your Mind - It's Gone!

By action of your own mind, you make yourself a PUPPET - and no longer think.

You may think this is nonsense, pure fantasy... I can think myself into NOT thinking? Ah, yes... Remember Milo, stuck in the Doldrums in The Phantom Tollbooth because he wasn't thinking? But this is not fantasy. This is for real. This can REALLY HAPPEN... and HAS HAPPENED. GKC is not so much giving a commentary (or predicting, considering its aptness for the present time!) but simply reporting.

Do you think this is profound, or find it unexpected? You will be even more surprised at what comes next:

Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape." The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own...
[CW1:236, emphasis added]

An aside: I wonder, did John Paul II read this before he wrote his 1998 encyclical called Fides et Ratio? (That is, "Faith and Reason"!) Alas, he did not quote GKC; I checked. (If you are seeking a doctoral topic, perhaps a study comparing these two great works might be most profitable.)

The surprise, I am sure you noticed, is that there is an answer, and it is in what MOST people nowadays consider the most unlikely place: the greatest support of Reason is in Faith. In fact, one cannot even have Reason unless one first has faith.

The few real philosophers with us are nodding happily. They are delighted that GKC has taken the Three Great Self-Evident Principles of Thought as his starting point, even though he doesn't state them explicitly. They will not mind that I review them for you:

(1) The existence of the thinking subject.
(2) The principle of contradiction: "A thing cannot at the same time be and not be."
(3) The natural capacity of our reason to know the truth.
These are also called the first fact, the first principle, and the first condition of certain knowledge.
[See Scholastic Philosophy by Michael W. Shallo, S.J.>

These three principles cannot be proven, but must be accepted, or you can do NOTHING AT ALL. Not even write a journal article for a philosophy magazine. Or even post a comment on a blogg...

Yes, if you never resume reading this book, nor ever read any GKC again, please memorise this ONE line.. OK, these three sentences - at least the one in BOLD:

"It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all."

Aren't you glad you kept reading? You thought all you were going to hear about was that awful peril - and here Chesterton is handing us a weapon! Wow. What a GREAT tool we now have! We have beaten flat most of the last few centuries of philosophers, and can now toss their books into the trash. They are all LIARS, rather, they are HYPOCRITES, doing what they refuse to admit is possible:

[The "moderate realism" of Thomism and Scholastic Philosophy] is the only working philosophy. Of nearly all other philosophies it is strictly true that their followers work in spite of them, or do not work at all. No sceptics work sceptically; no fatalists work fatalistically; all without exception work on the principle that it is possible to assume what it is not possible to believe. No materialist who thinks his mind was made up for him, by mud and blood and heredity, has any hesitation in making up his mind. No sceptic who believes that truth is subjective has any hesitation about treating it as objective.
[GKC, St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:542-3]

But you want to know more. GKC immediately gives an example from one of his "Heretic" friends, H. G. Wells. (Note: I call him that because of Chapter 5 in GKC's Heretics, and not from any personal criticism; GKC considered him a friend.)

...already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason.

Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all - the authority of a man to think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. [That's almost literally the definition of the above three principles!] And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.
[CW1:236-7, emphasis added]

Wow, did you catch this: "in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority" - isn't that horrifying! For that is the secret aim of so many of these philosophers! It's a war, after all - remember GKC's last words? "The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side." [Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 650] And we'll see, perhaps next week, how this idea will link to other matters - big, nasty, debate-making matters - that you might not expect.

But for today, just look at this - doesn't something seem familiar here? Remember: "If thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell - or into Hanwell."[CW1:224; cf Mt5:30, 18:8] Ah, yes - but here, there's someone else doing the pulling!

I was about to list names of these Dark Powers - but that would just make noise and waste your energy. (You'll hear one of them in the near future anyway; no it's neither "Sauron" nor "Voldemort".) Let them remain in the dark - you know who they are - I shall just call them the Dark Powers of Evil - those who have rejected the Good - these are all at work, claiming to advance "Reason" but really attacking it! They are hard at work, to pull off the mitres we all wear, in our sworn dedication to Faith... Indeed, the tower already reels.

You may think it is funny to consider all humans wearing the mitre, the conical hat of bishops, the symbol of pontifical power - but these things are serious, and come up in so many places in GKC. You need to ponder what it might mean to be a "pontiff" = "to build a bridge" - and how that must be both a matter of faith as well as reason. If you need a reading assignment, see GKC's memorial at the death of Francis Thompson, ILN Dec 14 1907 CW27:603, or look up the life and work of John Roebling (the Brooklyn Bridge designer), or of St. Benezet. Or, perhaps, even the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, where you'll read:

Thus alms are besought for the building of a bridge, or church, or for any other work whatever that is conducive to the common good..." [Summa II-II Q187 A5, emphasis added]

But - yes, yes - unless you read it in GKC, some of you won't believe it. So:

"...when men wish to be safely impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes of female dignity."
[What's Wrong With the World CW4:128]

Or if you prefer the fictional version:

"'All ceremony,' he said, 'consists in the reversal of the obvious. Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like women."
[Napoleon of Notting Hill CW6:247-8]

Why is this relevant? Because women are nearly always the first teachers of children. Remember, you cannot spell M-A-N without M-A - a truth which confutes all the feminists!

Let me end this very difficult and complex - but extremely important - stage of our journey with another quote from that excellent book on Education - no not Newman, but GKC. Another one you ought to memorise:

"A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching."
[What's Wrong With the World CW4:162]

I know at first you'll think that bit about women has NOTHING to do with pontiffs. You'll need to think about that - and perhaps read that book after we're done with this one.

Yes - please think carefully about all of this - while you still can. They are already attacking!

--Dr. Thursday

P.S. I must insist on this bridge matter as being a wonderful symbol for intellect and reason. Reason is, in a sense, a bridge we build from our inmost self to Reality - and like all bridges, requires faith and a firm foundation. It's most thoroughly human: "Building a bridge seemed such a clean, heroic thing for a man to do." [said of Roebling in David McCullough, The Great Bridge p.82-83] I could quote many additional demonstrations, but I shall give just the one which I first learned from Fr. Jaki:

The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind.
[GKC, The Defendant 75 quoted in Jaki, Chesterton a Seer of Science 45]

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