Minnesota Chesterton Conference to Focus on Economic Crisis

Sounds interesting, take a look here. If you can't get to Seattle, maybe you can get to Minneapolis?

#ChesterCon09

Tomorrow begins the 28th Annual American Chesterton Conference.

If you will be there and Twitter, please use the hashtag (#) #chestercon09 as this creates a searchable Twitter for those interested in following along. Thanks!

I hope to see you there, and if you cannot come, please know that you'll be with us in spirit as we celebrate the life and work of our man G. K. Chesterton.

Chesterton and Uncommon Sense

Dr. Thursday searched Chesterton for us and discovered some uses of the words "uncommon sense":

The fact that Thomism is the philosophy of common sense is itself a matter of common sense. Yet it wants a word of explanation, because we
have so long taken such matters in a very uncommon sense. STA CW2:513

Aesop embodies an epigram not uncommon in human history; his fame is all the more deserved because he never deserved it. The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots of uncommon sense, that characterize all the Fables, belong not to him but to humanity. Intro to Aesop's Fables in Spice of Life 61 also GKC as MC 83

Ward's GKC 389 in his letter to Shaw:
June 12th, 1915
MY DEAR BERNARD SHAW,
I ought to have written to you a long time ago, to thank you for your kind letter which I received when I had recovered and still more for many other kindnesses that seem to have come from you during the time before the recovery. I am not a vegetarian; and I am only in a very comparative sense a skeleton. Indeed I am afraid you must reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less like what I was before; and any resumption of my ordinary habits must necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you. What and where and when is "Uncommon Sense about the War?"

ILN August 13, 1932:

The mood of the moment in literature, or at least in fashionable literature, seems to be rather a queer one. At the best, it tends to the appeal through satire, and yet it is cut off from one of the main conditions of the appeal through satire: the appeal to sense. There is none of the accepted background of common sense against which figures
can be made to look comic and sprawling like caricatures; there is not a test of common sense, but rather a collision of uncommon senses

Chesterton Spottings

In a highly unusual turn of events, I've seen pictures and read articles about Chesterton in two publications this past week, both of which took me by surprise.

Apparently, I have gotten used to not seeing Chesterton anywhere other than my Gilbert Magazine.

The first sighting was in The Catholic New World, a publication of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The actual paper included a photo of our man.

GK: “The world is not lacking in wonders, but in a sense of wonder.” That’s pure G. K.Chesterton. A witty prolific English writer (1874-1936), also called the “prince of paradox,” received into the Catholic Church in 1922, and now (trumpets, please): his beatification was proposed this month by England’s Chesterton Society. Others say he should be named “father of the church of the 20th century.” His works range from apologetics to mystery novels to poetry — remember “The Hound of Heaven”? “The Chesterton Review” is still being published twice a year, exploring the life and work of this original thinker, and his “romance with orthodoxy.” Google The Chesterton Review, or phone(800) 526-7022 in East Orange, N.J., to subscribe.

As you can see, there was a complete failure to note the presence of the American Chesterton Society here, and its publication Gilbert Magazine. I sent a letter to the editor noting this glaring oversight. I did not mention that the Hound of Heaven was written by Francis Thompson, nor that the exact quote is slightly different than stated (although the meaning is the same). Nor did I mention that it wasn't exactly his beatification that was proposed, but simply the opening of the cause to investigate the situation.

Then, just as I was getting over that shock, I almost choked over my after-Mass coffee on Sunday to note that the current Our Sunday Visitor has an article titled, "Making the Case for Chesterton" (not available to non-subscribers on line, sorry!) in which writer Mark Sullivan reviews William Oddie's new biography and discusses the possibility of Chesterton's cause moving forward. This article happily mentions both the ACS and Gilbert Magazine. Yeah, us! It is a very good and thorough article. Sullivan interviewed Oddie via email.

Our man is getting some press, which is good, and well-deserved.

And the Winner is...

Wes--you win!

And the winning name is:

Uncommon Sense

After deliberating all weekend, our panel of impartial judges finally converged on what they believe to be the best podcast name of all time.

We felt it reflected both Chesterton's wit (it is common sense that is uncommon these days), links us with the EWTN show called the Apostle of Common Sense, indicates that the podcast will be filled with sense (which we hope it will be), is a bit unusual, and perhaps even paradoxical; is short, sweet, and in short, the best name.

Thank you to all entrants, your consolation prize is that you will be talked of at the conference this weekend as the bold, brave dedicated blog readers that you are. THANK YOU.

Wes--I need you to email me with your address so I can send you the prize! You will be the proud recipient of a genuine Chesterton Christmas ornament, donated by a dedicated Chestertonian. (Thank you, anon.)

Tough Duty

I've got the task now of finding the best name. Over 40 entries! You guys rock! Such great imagination and good humor.

OK, I gotta get back to work.

LAST DAY to Name That Podcast!

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

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

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

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

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

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

GKC's Cause

Please read this important post regarding Chesterton's cause.

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

Retrieving the Sense of Wonder

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first and simplest rule is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Does One Regain One's Sense of Wonder?

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

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

Conference T-Shirt lovers

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

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

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

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

Chesterton Reviewed in a French weekly magazine

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

Translated for us by Barb.

Conference T-Shirts

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

Call for Papers

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

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

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

A Paradox of Witches

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

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

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

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

...certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:254]

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

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

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

Chicago Area Performance of GKC's The Surprise

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

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

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

DIRECTOR: Dan Roche

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

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

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

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

H/T: Bob C.

John "Chuck" Chalberg's Web Page

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

H/T: Bob C.

ChesterCon09 Countdown: 17 days

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

Let me know if you are coming.

ChesterCon09 Twittering, etc.

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

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

Stay tuned!

ChesterCon09 countdown: 19 days

My Plane Ticket to Seattle....

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

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

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

See you in Seattle!