G.K. Chesterton Archives ~ Page 10 of 14 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Top Ten Books for My Desert Island

By Joseph Pearce|2025-03-14T15:32:44-05:00May 24th, 2016|Categories: Books, C.S. Lewis, Featured, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Homer, Joseph Pearce, Plato|

G.K. Chesterton was once asked what he would most like to have with him if he found himself marooned on a desert island. He replied, somewhat whimsically, that he’d like to have a book on practical shipbuilding. In this, if not in too much else, I’d like to beg to differ with the great man. [...]

Flirting with the Devil: A Walk on the Dark Side with Mrs. Wilde & Mrs. Chesterton

By Joseph Pearce|2016-05-14T22:37:06-05:00May 14th, 2016|Categories: Faith, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce|

You whom the pinewoods robed in sun and shade You who were sceptered with thistle’s bloom, God’s thunder! What have you to do with these The lying crystal and the darkened room? As a biographer who has published books on Oscar Wilde and G.K. Chesterton, I have always been fascinated by their [...]

The Good Christian’s Guide to Friendly Evangelism

By Michael Warren Davis|2023-07-29T21:06:51-05:00February 20th, 2016|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Religion|

Those who come to the Catholic Church are generally escaping the merely modern for the ancient, the enduring, and the everlasting. They do not want worship that reflects the current mood: They want worship instituted for all men and for all times. Though, as with any high-church Protestant, conversion to Roman Catholicism is always in [...]

Thomas Storck: Historian and Prophet

By Joseph Pearce|2019-05-02T11:04:21-05:00February 9th, 2016|Categories: Books, Christendom, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, History, Joseph Pearce|

A review of From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond by Thomas Storck (Angelico Press, 2015) Thomas Storck is a well-connected man. Indeed there are very few men who are better connected. I don’t mean that he is well-connected in the sense that the world normally thinks of it. He does not have lots of powerful [...]

Worth Doing Badly? Soccer & the Christian Pursuit of Perfection

By Joseph Pearce|2016-02-29T11:26:33-06:00January 29th, 2016|Categories: Christianity, Culture, Featured, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce, Morality|

One of my favourite sayings of G. K. Chesterton is his quip that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. When I first heard this paradoxical witticism I was somewhat scandalized by it. I had always been taught, as I suspect had most people, that if a thing is worth doing, [...]

Muddle-Heads and the Middle Ages

By Joseph Pearce|2016-02-12T15:27:51-06:00January 18th, 2016|Categories: Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Pearce, Timeless Essays|

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to explore the Middle Ages as they were, rather than through the muddled lens of the moderns. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher There is very little in our modern life that is more muddle-headed than the view that most moderns have of the [...]

Good Parenting & the Redemption of Giants

By Rebekah Curtis|2016-02-19T19:08:16-06:00January 9th, 2016|Categories: Books, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Featured, Fiction, G.K. Chesterton, Hope, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature|

“I should like to record my own love and my children’s love of E.A. Wyke-Smith’s Marvellous Land of Snergs,” reads an endorsement on the cover of that book. The endorser is J.R.R. Tolkien, and it was very kind of him to offer the guidance. Without him, it is likely we would only have visited a [...]

The Christian Humanism of Marshall McLuhan

By Christopher Morrissey|2022-07-20T18:40:38-05:00January 7th, 2016|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Christopher Morrissey, G.K. Chesterton, History|

Many have mistaken Marshall McLuhan for being a prophet of postmodernity. But McLuhan himself said, “I am a Thomist for whom the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos.” Postmodern intellectual culture is perhaps best characterized as adhering to the thesis that all reality is socially constructed. Many have mistaken Marshall McLuhan for being a [...]

Chesterton Casts a Spell on Tolkien

By Joseph Pearce|2018-09-24T14:25:12-05:00October 10th, 2015|Categories: Beauty, Christianity, Culture, Featured, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Pearce, Myth|

The great G.K. Chesterton had a huge impact on my embrace of Christian orthodoxy. It would, in fact, be no exaggeration to say that his was the greatest single influence, under grace, on my conversion. I was, therefore, highly gratified to discover, during the research for my book Literary Converts, that Chesterton also had a [...]

Chesterton, Tolkien and Lewis in Elfland

By Joseph Pearce|2019-11-26T12:15:28-06:00July 15th, 2015|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Fiction, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Pearce, Literature|

It is difficult to overstate the influence of G.K. Chesterton. Apart from the numerous converts who have come to Christianity, at least in part, because of an encounter with his writings, two of the bestselling books of all time were written, at least in part, under Chesterton’s benign patronage. The Lord of the Rings and [...]

A Fresh Perspective: Norman Rockwell & the World Turned Upside Down

By Patrick Toner|2020-06-10T10:21:40-05:00June 26th, 2015|Categories: Art, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien|

Humility is necessary in the case of Norman Rockwell, because his work itself has become trite. We think we know the pictures, so we do not ever bother to look. If they are to do their work of prompting us to a fresh perspective, and helping us to recover the things that have become trite, [...]

Chesterton, Madmen, and Madhouses

By Russell Kirk|2018-10-16T20:24:34-05:00June 14th, 2015|Categories: Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Literature, Moral Imagination, RAK, Russell Kirk|Tags: 1MA|

No man of his time defended more passionately the cause of sanity and “centricity” than did G. K. Chesterton—despite his aversion to watches and his uncalculated picturesqueness of dress. Yet no imaginative writer touched more often than did Chesterton upon lunacy, real or alleged: a prospect of his age with the madhouse for its background. “It [...]

Reasons to be Cheerful: Living in the Best of All Impossible Worlds

By Joseph Pearce|2021-04-08T14:06:54-05:00June 8th, 2015|Categories: Christianity, Featured, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce, Truth, Wisdom|

G. K. Chesterton once remarked that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds but in the best of all impossible worlds. Such apparent optimism might seem a little glib, at best, or outrageously naïve at worst. Wouldn’t it be much more true to say that we are in the grip of vice-like [...]