The Pope of Lepanto

We complete this month of April today - a busy month with Holy Week, the Triduum, and the Octave of Easter, with completing our study of GKC's Orthodoxy and with the obsequies for Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, and the usual assortment of the less dramatic matters of life.

Rather than start a new large project (what it might be I have no idea - do you?) rather than just wandering around through our AMBER collection bumping into unusual GKC quotes, I thought that since today, April 30, the feast of St. Pius V, is a Thursday, we might just take a brief look at this man, the Pope of Lepanto...

((click here to read more))
What is that "Lepanto" you ask? It was one of the greatest naval battles of history - Chesterton wrote a grand poem about it, and the ACS has a handy annotated edition with historical and literary commentaries - so I shall not try to condense it all here. But the battle happened on October 7, 1571, where the united forces of the West (the "Holy League") under the leadership of Don John of Austria, defeated the Turkish Armada in the bay of Lepanto, in Greece...

It was not a sure thing. The "Soldan of Byzantium", the leader of the Turks, had his eyes on Rome, the "Golden Apple" - the West was unstable, and seemed to be refusing to unite against him, and so he hoped to invade Italy and take a great prize, the heart of the Western World:

For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross...

This great Pope, Pius V, a Dominican, turned to God - he asked that Christians everywhere recite the Rosary, and people prayed - and they were heard:

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in a man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and verydear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark...

Yes... in Rome he had a vision of the battle, far to the east... and knew of the victory. But you need to read the poem in its entirety, and then get the book for more details.

In my study of the works of Fr. Jaki, I found another interesting detail, well worth some consideration in our present circumstances...

The Church was founded by Christ to be the embodiment of extraordinary faith or perspective. And it should seem nothing short of extraordinary that in spite of most ordinary churchmen - from popes through bishops to priests - that extraordinary perspective or mental vision was kept alive as time went on. The times were at times dark indeed. The history of celibacy is a case in point. Countless councils went on record against priestly concubinage. Canonical punishments of the harshest kind were leveled at offenders - apparently to no avail. At even worse times the abuses were tacitly condoned from the highest places. But even then there have been shining examples to the contrary. There were times of drastic shortage of priests, such as the years immediately following the Council of Trent. As a remedy, Emperor Maximilian begged the pope, Pius V, to permit priests to marry. The adamant refusal of the pope (he was adamant because he was a saint) was amply justified by the end of the sixteenth century. God once more produced children of Abraham out of an apparently barren landscape covered with stones. New orders - Jesuits, Piarists, Oratorians - and renewed old ones, Capuchin Franciscans in particular, and the seminaries set up by the decree of the Council of Trent, began to bear ample fruit.
[Jaki, "Man of One Wife or Celibacy" in Catholic Essays, 84-5]

Possibly we need to pray more...

Yes, the Archconfraternity of the Holy Rosary still exists, and it is still fighting the Powers of Darkness, which are busy working against us... See here for details on how to join.

A Blogger Convert's Story Involving Chesterton

Andrew Pudewa

Over the weekend, I had the privilege of meeting Andrew Pudewa, director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing, who was giving talks at the homeschooling conference I was attending.

Mr. Pudewa's talks were filled with humor and a huge dose of common sense. It seemed to me as if he were borrowing a lot of ideas from our largest and best friend, GKC.

So it was not a surprise to hear that not only does Andrew love Chesterton, he is a lifetime member of the American Chesterton Society. I didn't know we had lifetime members, that must be from a lifetime ago, before my time with the ACS, I guess.

Another Young Adult Novelist Inspired by Chesterton

James Kennedy interviewed by Chicagoist:

C: It’s very, Roald Dahlian? Dahl-esque?

JK: Oh, he is exactly what I want to be like.

C: It’s very James and the Giant Peach-ish. I take it his writing was--

JK: Love Dahl. Love everything about him.

C: One of the biggest inspirations in this book?

JK: He’s one of the inspirations but he’s not the biggest. Probably the biggest is—have you read anything by GK Chesterton?

C: No.

JK: He wrote a book in around 1905 called The Man Who Was Thursday. It’s about a group of anarchists in turn-of-the-century London, each of them named after a day of the week. They’re led by Sunday, who’s this larger-than-life, beyond-good-and-evil character. The hero, a policeman, infiltrates the group as Thursday, to get at Sunday. The Belgian Prankster and Sunday have a lot in common. Sunday seems to float above the narrative. His character reminded me of like, when you see Bill Murray in a movie, he sometimes seems like he’s detached from the movie he’s in, that he’s ironically distant from the story that his character is in. Anyway, the idea of Sunday fed into my idea of the Belgian Prankster, who’s ironically removed from the entire world. Of somebody who he wants to make the worst joke ever.

Conference Logo Found in Secret Internet Location!

Designed by Ted. Schluenderfritz, artist extraordinaire!

Fr. Rutler on Fr. Jaki

From the Rutler article:

Father Jaki's great lights were Newman and Chesterton, about whom he wrote books from his unique perspective as a philosopher of science, but his intellectual father was Pierre Duhem, mathematician and physicist. He even wrote a book about Duhem's hobby of painting landscapes. That spectacular French pioneer in thermodynamics and hydrodynamics paved the way for Father Jaki's perception of the essential role of Christianity, and in particular medieval scholastics such as Oresme, in providing the mental and cultural matrix for the development of modern physics.

...and...

In electing Newman and Duhem and Chesterton for mental fraternity, he was organizing in subconscious hope what might be a convivium in the heavens of the Savior of Science.

Read it all here.

St. George and Father Jaki

Sean, our steadfast editor-of-the-magazine, reminds me that today is the feast dayof St. George, who "was for England", and so I gladly fly his banner, full of strong heraldry, which is blazoned "Argent, a cross gules".

And so, to supply Sean's patrons at his Blue Boar blogg, I hunt through the nearly 300 references to St. George in AMBER, wondering (as I am during this time) if there might be something which will help shed some light on Father Jaki and his work. And I found something remarkable...

((click here to read more ))

I saw this morning a literary competition in an exceedingly highbrow weekly, a prize being awarded for a conversation between a modern interviewer and St. George. And I was struck by the fact that clever, and even brilliant, contributors missed much of the point, even about the modern interviewer, by missing the point about the ancient saint. I am not setting up as an authority on either. I am not pretending to be learned; nor is there here any question of learning. It is a question of quite superficial information, but of information that is fairly well spread out over the whole surface. I have not been right slap-bang through "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" lately, any more than had Mr. Silas Wegg; I have not read every word of the "Acta Sanctorum" within the last week or so; I have not even read very closely the relatively romance of "The Seven Champions of Christendom." I have nothing but general information; but it is fairly general. What surprises me in people younger, brighter, and more progressively educated than myself is that their general information is very patchy.

Now, it is unfair to say that they know nothing about St. George, because it may fairly be answered that there is nothing to be known about St. George. In one sense, nobody knows who St. George was; we only know who he was not. The only clear and solid fact about him is that he certainly was not what Gibbon said he was; the contractor of Cappadocia. He was merely recorded as a common soldier of the legions martyred with multitudes under Diocletian; nor is there any particular reason to doubt that he was. All the rest is legend, though legend is often very valuable to history. And I mean by general information the sense of the life in legends; how they grow; where they come from; why they remain. I know what saints
were supposed to be; what patron saints were supposed to do; how they often did it for the most diverse groups ages after their death; how other saints besides George dealt with dragons; how other nations besides England invoked St. George; how the saints were before the knights; how the knights were before the nations; and so
on. In short, I have picked up quite crudely what Mr. Wells calls an Outline of History; but a more scientifically educated generation still seems to have only snippets of history; the lie out of Gibbon; the legend about the dragon; the phrase "St. George for Merry England," and such isolated items. The result is a curious sort of narrowness, even about the problem of the present or the immediate past. For instance, one quite intelligent contributor apparently identified "St. George" as somebody supposed to have lived in "Merry England," and explained that his period (whatever it was supposed to be) was not really merry, because there was a great deal of mud in the streets, or people lived in mud hovels. Apart from everything else, I call it narrow for a man to suppose that Mud is the opposite of merriment. Did he never make any mud-pies? Was he not much merrier making them than contributing to intellectual weeklies?

But the essential point is this. Everybody thought the joke must be found in showing how unlike St. George's time was to ours. I think it would be a much better joke to show how extremely like St. George's time was to ours. But the writers are hampered in this by being extremely vague about what was St. George's time. Now, a man in the later Roman Empire, like George the Martyr, would have seen all round him an ancient world that was astonishingly like the modern world. Whether or no Merry England was a suitable phrase for mediaevalism, whether or no mediaevalism was all mud, it is quite certain that the Empire of Diocletian was not all mud. Imperial Rome was not all mud, but all marble, all mortar and massive building, all pipes and tanks and engineering, all sorts of elaborate equipments of luxury or hygiene. And among all those palatial baths and towering aqueducts, George would probably be thinking pretty much what many an intelligent man is thinking now - that man does not live by soap alone; [Cf Mt 4:4 quoting Dt. 8:3] and that hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it - or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

Suppose, for instance, that the soldier George had read some of the satires on fashionable society that were produced in that old Pagan world. He would find fact after fact and fashion after fashion exactly parallel to our own. He would find Juvenal making fun of fashionable ladies who join in masculine sports or adventures in a spirit of self-advertisement. The Roman satirist describes how grand Roman ladies would appear as gladiators in the arena, sacrificing not only modesty, but the manners of their rank in order to be in the limelight. That exact fashionable blend of Feminism and Publicity did really exist in the real epoch of the real St. George; almost exactly as it exists today. Or suppose the Roman soldier read the religious and philosophical literature circulating through the Roman Empire. He would find all that we call New Religions now already called New Religions then. He would find idealists who were Vegetarians, like Apollonius of Tyana; theosophists who had learned all about Reincarnation from Brahmins and Hindu seers; prophets of the Simple Life in the drawing-rooms of duchesses, talking about the secrets of health., wealth, and wisdom; promises of a new Universal Religion, which should include all beliefs without any particular belief in any of them. If the real original St. George did find himself interviewed by a modern newspaper man, he would think that hardly anything in the newspaper was new. He would not think primarily that he had come into a strange world, far away from dragons and princesses and mediaeval armour. he would think he had got back into the old bewildered and decaying world of the last phase of Paganism, loud with denials of religion and louder with the howlings of superstition. Certainly he would find himself in a world in which it was possible to say much of what the Pagan philosophers and much of what the Christian Fathers said of those original Last Days. But I will not push the enquiry so far as to ask whether, in this epoch or in that, there was anything particular for the Saint to do, except to die.

[ILN June 18 1932 reprinted in All I Survey; thanks to Frank Petta and my mother]

You may be wondering what any of that has to do with Father Jaki and his work. It's very simple. As GKC says, "I think it would be a much better joke to show how extremely like St. George's time was to ours. But the writers are hampered in this by being extremely vague about what was St. George's time." One of the important things Fr. Jaki has done is to bring to light some very interesting details about the past - in particular about science and scientists. He wrote with far more erudition - which is a fancy word meaning he uses lots more footnotes, which tell you what books he's read - but his argument is much the same as GKC's. It's a matter of seeing things more clearly, more deeply - and knowing how "saints dealt with dragons".

It's a useful skill, for there still are dragons around. To arms!

World Wide Library Holdings of Chesterton Works

From Ellen:

Hi Nancy,

I came across an interesting GKC source on the internet today, and it might be of interest to your blog readers.

Or simply, go here, search G.K. Chesterton.

It is a public catalog listing of holdings of all libraries that subscribe to a cataloging database once known as OCLC. It is a good source to find books, check titles, etc.

I looked at the GK Chesterton page, and it had all kinds of neat features, including a publications "timeline", works in other languages, etc. Remember, this lists LIBRARY HOLDINGS, not everything everywhere, but it is an interesting resource, I think.

Or a great timewaster.

Or blog fodder.

Thanks, Ellen!

E.C. Bentley's Mystery Fiction Reviewed

Gilbert Columnist speaking in Chicago

Gilbert columnist David Fagerberg is participating in an upcoming conference in the Chicago Archdiocese:

The Liturgical Institute presents

Liturgy, Justice and Social Reconstruction
April 24, 2009

A one day conference restoring the link between the grace given in the Sacred Liturgy and the renewal of society. Find out more.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “…it is not easy for man, wounded by sin, to maintain moral balance.” Grace is therefore necessary to purify and elevate these human acts, and the surest font of grace is the sacred liturgy. Real societal reconstruction, often called “social justice,” is only possible when connected to the Church’s worship. More than secular social work or political activism alone, societal reconstruction grows from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to make human beings the “hands” of Christ so that in a life of virtue, we may love our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.

Please join the Liturgical Institute and the following speakers as we address this topic:
Dr. David Fagerberg, University of Notre Dame; Reverend Dennis Gill, Office of Worship, Archdiocese of Philadelphia; Dr. Elizabeth Nagel, Mundelein Seminary; Reverend Edward Oakes, SJ, Mundelein Seminary; Reverend Martin Zielinski, Mundelein Seminary

WHEN: April 24, 2009
WHERE: University of Saint Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary
Conference Center, Mundelein, IL
REGISTRATION
FEE: $75.00
ADDITIONAL: www.liturgicalinstitute.org
INFORMATION: Barbara – 847.837.4542

Does God Exist? A Modern Debate

It took place recently at Biola University in California.

I wish Chesterton had been on the other side of that stage, don't you? I mean, how easy it is to say, "you have the burden of proof, since you say God exists. *I* don't have to prove anything, since I say he doesn't exist."

(I can see Chesterton chuckling to himself, and taking notes with a pencil on scraps of paper while Mr. Hitchens speaks. Then, he may turn and say, "Well, maybe you don't have to prove God exists, since you, though a notable orator and skilled debater on a variety of subjects, cannot take up this simplest of subjects; perhaps you'd like to prove to us then your own existence. Are you real, Mr. Hitchens? Are you alive, Mr. Hitchens? How do you prove your own existence and what, exactly, and more importantly I might add, are you existing for? For what purpose and meaning is your life, to go round the country telling people their beliefs are nonsense? Then, by virtue of your own words, your own beliefs are nonsense. For people believe, Mr. Hitchens, in dogma, whether they know they do, or not." Or something like that, and chuckling and smiling all the time.)

Yes, Mr. Hitchens. That's why you make money on books about how God doesn't exist, by stating you don't have anything to prove?

Well, this sounds like a lower form of evolution to me. And a lower form of debate, too.

The first principle of debate is for the sides to be open to being persuadable. Mr. Hitchens is obviously dogmatically tied to his doctrine. The Christians were too nice to him. They should have brought out swords and prepared to fight to the death. Mr. Hitchens has already proved for years he is unmoved by words. He needs a "Chesterton" to befriend him and love him into faith (which still might not happen--look at Shaw), or someone to threaten him, like in a foxhole, or a 9-11, or a miracle. His heart is completely hardened. This can't be fixed on one evening's debate.

Dr. Thomas Dillon of TAC

The American Chesterton Society mourns the loss of Dr. Thomas Dillon of Thomas Aquinas College in California. Dr. Dillon died in a tragic car accident while traveling in Ireland.

Captalist Socialist Distributist Conference Report

Dear friends of The Society for Distributism,

Photographs and a brief summary of last week's conference may be found here.

Many of you have asked if the conference was taped. The event was recorded, however we will inform all of you if and when this becomes available.

I want to thank each and every one of you for your prayers and support. The event was a success thanks to all of you. --Richard Aleman

Easter Meditation, GKC and Jaki

Happy Thursday in the Octave of Easter!

Few paragraphs of GKC have the sheer emotional power of this one. It will make you cry - and laugh - and jump up and down... it will make you want to write, to cook, to work, to play, to do whatever you have to do - in order to have your share of the utterly amazing life that GKC describes...

((click here to continue))
And it's what Christians have been doing for the last 2000 years:

The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. One incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seemed quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:295-6, emphasis added]

As you know, last week was the completion of the commentary on GKC's Orthodocy - and though I did make a small tribute to Fr. Jaki there, and thereby a token bow to the dramatic liturgical moment of Holy Thursday, I hardly could write what I wanted to about either Jaki or Holy Thursday.

Today, I have at least posted the suitable Chesterton quote for this time - oh, how it ought to be made into a vast bold painting, or a really loud rock song - or perhaps a rock musical... or something, with a gigantic pipe organ and an orchestra, like the Jungen piece called "Symphonie Concertante"... well, I cannot go into that now. I don't have a pipe organ here, or access to one. Not at present, anyway.

And I ought to have written about Holy Thursday too. Perhaps for Corpus Christi I can do something.

But also I need to write about Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, OSB - and yet I find it too soon. Like the Fellowship of the Ring, mourning in Lorien, as Legolas said it is too soon for such things.

So instead I shall quote Jaki, and give you a glimpse of the relation this great Chestertonian scholar had with our Uncle Gilbert...

[My book] Miracles and Physics begins with a quotation of Chesterton's dictum: "The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen." [from "The Blue Cross" in The Innocence of Father Brown] This dictum is worth quoting not only on account of its paradoxical strength, but also because it is part and parcel of the vast and ever fresh outflow of the thought of a truly Christian philosopher. I did not put it this way either in my book, Chesterton: A Seer of Science, or in my essay, "G. K. C. as R. C.", and much less in my first publication on Chesterton, a study of his criticism of Blatchford, a prominent British atheist of the turn of the century, whose books sold at that time by the millions. That they are now totally forgotten may suggest that atheism may not be the best assurance for a book to be kept in print. Atheism has to be reinvented again and again. Only the unadvised see in it originality as it finds ever new spokesmen for some antiquated arguments.
My original encounter with Chesterton goes back to the mid-1950s, when I read through his Orthodoxy, though I hardly plumbed its depth. One phrase in it, however, became engraved in my memory, and I found it very effective in disarming young atheists, increasingly numerous among Catholic college students. In that phrase, Chesterton exposed the rationalist, who tries to put heaven in his head and finds his skull split in the effort. Years later, when I took a more sustained look at Chesterton's major works, my interest in him was certainly aroused on seeing his remarkable battling of scientism, my bête noire. But since I had already flayed that dead horse more than it deserved, I doubt that I would have been prompted to delve into Chesterton's thought for that reason alone.
Two further promptings had to come so that in the back of my mind there should slowly emerge the plan of Chesterton: A Seer of Science. One of the two was the falling into my hands of an unpretentious volume in the Pocket Books series, Great Essays in Science, put together by Martin Gardner. Most of the essays reprinted there were familiar to me. But I was utterly surprised to find among them "The Logic of Elfland," a chapter from Chesterton's Orthodoxy. When I first read it sometime in 1956 I was utterly blind to the extraordinary grasp which Chesterton displayed there of what science was truly about. The other prompting came when I read, about ten years later, Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas and Gilson's astonished comment on it. Gilson had just delivered his famed Gifford Lectures, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, but on reading Chesterton's book he became convinced that Chesterton seized the gist of Thomas' thought in a way that could not be improved upon.
As I did my research on Chesterton: A Seer of Science I found that this was not Gilson's first encounter with Chesterton. He had already heard, around 1927, Chesterton lecture at the University of Notre Dame. Gilson felt that he was in the presence of a first-class philosopher who in addition had a facility with phrases that philosophers usually cannot match. Forty or so years later Gilson emphatically repeated this erstwhile evaluation of Chesterton, the philosopher. Chesterton was, of course, a Christian who philosophized without trying to become a philosopher. Like Gilson, Chesterton came to Christian philosophy rather unintentionally. By battling solipsism as a deadly enemy, Chesterton could find life and sanity only in that realism which dogmatic, orthodox Christianity alone could assure. Chesterton soon saw that Catholicism was the only form of Christianity that consistently and firmly stood for facts and reality. The evidence is already in Heretics where Chesterton gives his reasons why Christ chose Peter, the fumbler, to be the rock foundation of His Church. [this is in CW1:70] One of the greatest challenges of Chesterton's biographers is to explain why it took a dozen years before Chesterton formally joined the Church. They must, of course, take into account the inscrutable workings of God's sovereign grace.
In my book on Chesterton I dealt strictly with the richness of his reflections on science, which would have done credit to any accomplished philosopher and historian of science. The chapters of that book came from lectures delivered at the University of Notre Dame, to the dismay of some professors there who found it intolerable that so many "conservatives" came to hear me. Liberals once more displayed their illiberality as well as their shallowness of mind, which resorts to easy categorizations instead of serious appraisals of the matter on hand. One of those professors dismissed Chesterton as a "mere journalist." He did not take note when I personally called his attention to Gilson's testimony about Chesterton's greatness as a philosopher.
Chesterton was also a Catholic who never tried to conceal that he was a Catholic. He knew that concealment in that respect is its most counterproductive form. For it is an ageless truth that man is a religious being and those prove this best who use philosophy to show that they are not. Man is a being who lives by religion whether he admits this or not. By trying to live without religion man can all too readily succeed in turning into an animal, a fact which philosophers have the primary duty to consider, unless they care only for their own ideas. Increasingly they do not care for matters that weigh most heavily on men's minds.
[Jaki, A Mind's Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography 196-8]

If you are a scientist - you ought to get Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science and read it. And even if you are not a scientist, you ought to get it and read it.

More another time.

Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine.
Et lux perpetua luceat ei.
Requiescat in pace. Amen.

"Our God knows the way out of the grave." [See GKC TEM CW2:382]

The Ball and the Cross

I've just finished reading The Ball and The Cross for the very first time.

I. Loved. It.

OK, I cried at the end. And sometimes, that makes me love a book. It has a very satisfying and satisfactory ending. But everything that happens along the way is exciting, too. The adventurous travels, the constant seeking to find a place to duel, the introduction of the women, whom you just know become wives, the priest, the devil--this book has it all. It was a page-turner for me, and kept me company during a long illness. I highly recommend it.

I read it in the Ignatius Press Collected Works Vol. 7, which you can get here, or you can get the book alone here.

New Book: A Treasury of Chesterton Aphorisms

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), widely considered the greatest Christian apologist of the first third of the twentieth century and champion of the "common man," was a master of the aphorism: pithy, astute, proverb-like sayings or maxims that comment on general truths of life.

This 300-page collection consists of more than 2100 Chesterton quotations: all single sentences, drawn from 34 of his non-fiction books and 229 articles written for The Illustrated London News.

They have been painstakingly selected and organized under 281 topics, with extensive cross-referencing underneath, directing readers to many related topics. The aphorisms under each category are presented in the order they appear in Chesterton’s works, and chronologically from one work to the next. Access is made easier by handy indices of topics and citations categorized by primary sources.

This sounds quite handy.
H/T: Mark C.

Fr. Jaki Obits

Seton Hall University
New York Times
From the Pontifical Academy of Sciences

New Books available from the ACS on-line catalog

William Oddie’s new bio of GKC:

The first volume of the most comprehensive biography of Chesterton ever to appear. Oddie has brought together previously unpublished material to provide insight into Chesterton's spiritual formation. In the process, he methodically dispels many of the unsavory rumors about GKC that have been carelessly bandied about for years. Any serious student of Chesterton must read this book. Highly recommended by the American Chesterton Society.

And The Coloured Lands (with a new afterword by Martin Gardner):

Essays, sketches, poems, short stories and some indescribable stuff from Chesterton, compiled by Maisie Ward. First published just after his death, it is one of his most sought after books, now back in print at last. Includes "Half Hours in Hades," "The Disadvantage of Having Two Heads," "Immortal Idiots," "Mrs. Chesterton's Donkeys," and of course, "Plakkopytrixophylisperambulantiobatrix." Completely Delightful.

A Very Blessed and Happy Easter to you

May this Easter be a peaceful and hopeful time for you and your family.

I am struggling with bronchitis, but I'm on the mend now that I have antibiotics.

And since I won't be sitting next to you in church this Sunday (and you wouldn't want me to, I have the worst sounding cough!), may I wish you a virtual "Kiss of Peace" and say

Peace be with you, Blessed Easter!

News about the Conference!

More news about the conference topics and talks, with specifics coming at the end of April.