“Chesterton challenged the common belief that previous generations were foolish.” By Shane Parrish. Chesterton’s Fence is a principle that reminds us to look before we leap. To understand before we act. It’s a cautionary reminder to understand why something is the way it is before meddling in change. The principle comes from a parable by… Read More Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking
“The Patriarchs” of the ten tribes are men whose God-given task, even to risking death, is to protect family, especially women and daughters when in danger; because woman carries the very future in her womb. Hierarchy in Church and family has no retirement or expiration date. But even many so-called conservative (or ‘Trad’) couples are… Read More Abiding Patriarchy
Rod Dreher. “It’s possible to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism, precisely because we have a misunderstanding of how its power works. In 1951, poet and literary critic Czesław Miłosz, exiled to the West from his native Poland as an anti-communist dissident, wrote that Western people misunderstand the nature of communism because they think of it… Read More The “Gentleness” of “Soft” Totalitarianism
Is masturbation and homosexuality the main answer to the “problem” of human procreation? Eugenicist Henry Havelock Ellis thought and taught so. Ellis was ahead of his time. Is his vision of fitness and population already underway? Is it moral? The Church answers no. But science (a philosophically loaded term if ever there was one) answers… Read More Henry Havelock Ellis’ Vision for Carrying on the Human Race
“How did both world wars impact the iconic works of Tolkien and Lewis? Socrates in the City host Eric Metaxas is joined by author and historian Joseph Loconte to discuss his newest book, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945. ,, Throughout this book and conversation, the looming… Read More Could England Fall? Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton.
Neither Socialism nor lassez faire CapitalismOctober 1, 2001 | By Mark and Louise Zwick The following was a talk given at the American Chesterton Society annual conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June 2001. Dorothy Day and G. K. Chesterton were contemporaries. Both came into Catholicism in the 1920’s, Chesterton in 1922 at age 48… Read More G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day on Economics
Put the news aside for a time. If unhappiness is growing consider it a reset signal to return to philosophy where all education and earthly wisdom began. …This is an excellent series, very informative and very fair to Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment philosophies. Thales to Sartre and beyond. 81 comprehensive episodes. One can learn something… Read More Dr. Arthur Holmes Lectures. A History of Philosophy.
In a biography of G.K. Chesterton published in 1943, Maisie Ward tells of this remarkable trait of the great convert and Catholic apologist: “(He) liked everybody very much, and everything very much. He liked even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to be tired. After…[a particular period of]… Read More G. K. Chesterton and The Eternal Thank You
Understanding the Epistemological Foundations of Scientific Totalitarianism. by Phillip D. Collins. Scientific totalitarianism is certainly not a new topic in the halls of political science and history. Given its bloody legacy of democide (i.e., state-sanctioned genocide, mass murder, and politicide) and its prolific spread throughout the world, scientific totalitarianism remains a preoccupying sociopolitical phenomenon of… Read More The Faustian Face of Modern Science
— from Part II of the Catholics & American Life Symposium. New Oxford Review. January-Febuary 2025. On Christmas Day 1886, 18-year-old Paul Claudel — raised Catholic but delinquent in his faith — was listening to vespers in Notre-Dame de Paris. It was an event that “dominates my entire life,” he later recounted. “My heart was touched, and… Read More Karl Keating: Catholics & American Life
And replies. By What Authority Does C.S. Lewis Pontificate? By Thomas Storck | New Oxford Review. Thomas Storck is a Contributing Editor of the New Oxford Review. The great Anglican apologist and scholar C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) championed a concept he called “mere Christianity.” Although the term itself seems to have been coined by the Puritan… Read More Is There Such a Thing as “Mere Christianity”?
+ Where they would take us. Ingenious in ephemeral things and foolish in Eternal things. By Msgr. Charles Pope. We live in times of great ingenuity. We have a lot of clever smarts. We have been to the moon and back. Our computers never cease to amaze, as we make them smaller and more powerful.… Read More Technological Giants, Moral Psychopaths
“The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He cannot sleep in… Read More G. K. Chesterton on Man
Economics as If Families Mattered. by Joseph Pearce. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very centre of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern societies. In the current… Read More Small Is Still Beautiful
‘The West believes man’s destiny is prosperity and an abundance of goods. So does the Politburo.” –Whittaker Chambers “A communist spy himself, Chambers had a Christian conversion and declared that in 1937, he began “like Lazarus, the impossible return.” His return to the principles of freedom made him one of the most forceful anti-communists of… Read More Why Whittaker Chambers Matters
“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in… Read More G.K. Chesterton on The “Church of Science” and Tyranny
“Chesterton’s defense of Father Christmas reveals a deeper truth: Christ’s birth conquers every winter of the world.” Joseph Pearce, National Catholic Register. December 18, 2024. … Having defended myself, and Chesterton, from any pharisaical guardians of the feast, I’m going to risk the ire of lovers of Christmas by confessing that I prefer good old Father… Read More ‘Father Christmas’ Will Never Die Because Christ Has Risen From the Dead
C. S. Lewis once said that reading literature from the past is like a clean sea breeze blowing through our musty minds. Interview by Greg Peters. This article is from the November 2023 issue. Christianity Today. In recent decades, evangelicals studying faith in the Middle Ages have done much to recover its variety and richness. Yet… Read More Mystics, Monastics, and the Moderns Who Need Them
By Joseph Pearce “…In the world before religion was banished by the new godless creeds of secularism, there were no labor camps, no concentration camps, no gas chambers, no blitzkrieg, no Hiroshimas or Nagasakis. And yet the new atheists, proclaiming the creed of “progress,” have the sheer temerity and audacity to claim that religion and… Read More G.K. Chesterton and the Meaning of Progress
G.K. Chesterton and the Meaning of Progress by Joseph Pearce. “Progress is a useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined direction: and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree.” G.K. Chesterton c. 1920 (photo: Public Domain).National Catholic Registerwith permission of author. The great British writer G.K. Chesterton insisted that progress… Read More What Good is ‘Progress’ in the Wrong Direction?
G. K. Chesterton: “In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon… Read More Man could do no more… Pilate “washed his hands of the world”
“One of the greatest Catholic minds of the twentieth century was a journalist, playwright, novelist, literary critic, poet, cartoonist, essayist, broadcaster, and even president of the Detection Club. But he was also a theologian. G. K. Chesterton, famous for defending Christian belief in his books Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man (the latter helped to convert… Read More G.K. Chesterton, Theologian. By Aidan Nichols
John West’s book, The Magicians Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society Beloved for his Narnian tales for children and his books of Christian apologetics for adults, best-selling author C.S. Lewis also was a prophetic critic of the growing power of scientism in modern society, the misguided effort to apply science to areas outside… Read More C.S. Lewis and Evolution
The gifted Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, by any standard, was a most extraordinary person. Donald DeMarcoNational Catholic Register February 23, 2022 Sigrid Undset walked into the manager’s office of the Aschehoug publishing company, one of the largest in Norway, and tossed G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) onto his desk, exclaiming that “this is the… Read More Sigrid Undset — A Catholic Woman for Our Time
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