Note, Session 5 was cancelled due to extreme cold temperatures. Session 6 covers the material from session 5 as well as the final chapter and review.
GK Chesterton shows that any true reform or revolution requires a fixed ideal and objective truth. Furthermore, Christian Orthodoxy provides this ideal and truth which can reform the world. Chesterton's apologetic or proof or Christianity is that it alone makes man truly joyful!
We discuss Chesterton's classic Orthodoxy. Chapters 5 and 6: The Flag of the World and The Paradoxes of Christianity.
Chesterton points out that we all owe a loyalty to the world which is best characterized as a sort of patriotism. We must hate the world enough to want to reform it, but love it enough to believe it is worth reforming.
In chapter 6, Chesterton presents the paradoxes of Christianity -- this one religion is criticized on every side and from every angle. At one too pompous and too humble, too obsessed with sex and too repressive of sex, too rich and too poor, too womanly and too much a woman's religion, too pacifist and too violent, etc. And suddenly, it occurred to Chesterton that the Church is either miraculously wrong or miraculously right, either straight from heaven or straight from hell. Either way, Christianity is nothing like any other religion. And, as it turns out, the extremes of Christianity happen to fit perfectly the extremes of real life - like a lock to a key, Christianity is the religion of the Creator.
We discuss chapters 3 and 4 of Chesterton's classic Orthodoxy: The Suicide of Thought and The Ethics of Elfland.
In these chapters, Chesterton speaks first of the crisis of thought which is prevalent also in our day - not so much to reject what has come before, but to pretend like the genius of previous ages never existed. If a man does not love the Medieval Theologians, he should at least hate them - but modern man commits the suicide of thought by pretending there were no theologians in the middle ages, and that no one until our modern day has anything to contribute to philosophy, theology, or reason.
In The Ethics of Elfland, Chesterton puts forward his own apologetic for morality. This is a most compelling chapter -- Why should we be good? Because the world is beautiful, and being good is a way of expressing our gratitude to the Creator.
We discuss the first two chapters of GK Chesterton's apologetical classic "Orthodoxy." In Defense of Everything Else, and The Maniac -- in which Chesterton lays out the scope of his work, and begins his survey of what is wrong with modern thought.
Introduction to GK Chesterton and the book Orthodoxy.