G.K. Chesterton Archives ~ Page 13 of 14 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Francis Thompson: Remembering a Forgotten Poet

By Joseph Pearce|2020-10-14T16:24:48-05:00January 23rd, 2014|Categories: Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce, Poetry|

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind… There was a time when the opening lines of Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven”, would have been widely known. Today, as I discovered [...]

G.K. Chesterton and Modernity

By Stratford Caldecott|2022-05-28T22:43:19-05:00January 17th, 2014|Categories: Books, Christendom, Christianity, Communio, Culture, Featured, G.K. Chesterton, Modernity, Morality, Stratford Caldecott|

Chesterton recognized that heart and hearth, work and worth, are all of a piece. Human flourishing is found in families, human wholeness in holiness. Civilization depends on faith—faith both in the transcendent horizon that many call God, but also faith in reason, and in the ability of human intelligence to grasp objective truth. by [...]

The War of the Wells: Bellocian Bellicosity vs. Chestertonian Charity

By Joseph Pearce|2016-02-12T15:28:15-06:00January 13th, 2014|Categories: Books, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Joseph Pearce|

Much of G. K. Chesterton’s work is an engagement with relativism and modernism in their multifarious manifestations. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Everlasting Man, arguably his most important book. It was no mere coincidence that Chesterton’s book should appear in 1925, the same year that H.G. Wells’s Outline of History was first [...]

Chesterton and the Meaning of Progress

By Joseph Pearce|2016-02-12T15:28:16-06:00December 11th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce, Politics, Progressivism|

The great British writer G.K Chesterton insisted that progress is not merely a problem but is “the mother of problems”. It is, therefore, necessary to understand what progress is, and perhaps more importantly what it is not, before we can fully understand and solve the multitude of problems to which it has given birth. One [...]

Mysticism, Rationalism & Coffee

By Stratford Caldecott|2016-02-14T16:01:02-06:00December 4th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Communio, Culture, G.K. Chesterton, Stratford Caldecott|

I have written here about the salvation to be found in an English tea ceremony. Coffee on the other hand, I have always thought of as an American drink. I was introduced to great-tasting coffee a long time ago in Vermont, by a man who brewed it in test-tubes and fed it through an enormous [...]

G.K. Chesterton and the Dandelion: The Romance of Receptiveness

By Stratford Caldecott|2016-07-17T10:00:08-05:00August 16th, 2013|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Communio, Featured, G.K. Chesterton, Sainthood, Stratford Caldecott|

G.K. Chesterton And at this I cursed them and kicked at them and made an exhibition of myself; having made myself the champion of the Lion’s Tooth, with a dandelion rampant on my crest. Gilbert Keith Chesterton (d. 1936), who wrote these words, was an English “man of letters” – a novelist, journalist, [...]

The Novels of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis

By Joseph Pearce|2020-06-12T16:55:58-05:00July 19th, 2013|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Catholicism, Christianity, Featured, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce, Literature|

G.K. Chesterton The towering figures of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis straddle the twentieth century literary landscape like beacons of faith and reason, shining forth in the fog and murk of modernity. Their combined legacy as indomitable Christian apologists in an age of skepticism is without equal in the English-speaking world. Taking up [...]

Russell Kirk: An Integrated Man

By Ian Boyd|2016-02-12T15:28:24-06:00May 14th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Community, Conservatism, Culture, G.K. Chesterton, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk|Tags: 1IR|

The most obvious and important thing that must be said about Russell Kirk concerns the harmony that existed between his public and his private life. He was an integrated man who lived what he wrote. There were no disappointing disjunctions between the private and the public self. On the contrary, the happy domestic life at [...]

For Saxons, Think Americans and Wonder

By Stephen Masty|2016-02-12T15:28:26-06:00April 24th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, History, Poetry, Stephen Masty|Tags: Norman Conquest of England, Rudyard Kipling|

The thousandth anniversary of the Norman Conquest of England, in 1066 AD, is still a few decades away and most people know the related story of food and the cultural differences. Our modern English words for domestic animals tend to be the names used by the lowly Saxon farmer-folk who raised them, while once the [...]

G. K. Chesterton: Rallying the Really Human Things

By Vigen Guroian|2022-10-03T09:32:22-05:00April 12th, 2013|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton|Tags: 1IR, Orthodoxy, Vigen Guroian|

Chesterton proposed a new Christian humanism, while simultaneously warning of the dangers of a popular secular humanism that behaves as a religion. We need a rally of the really human things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers.[1] That was the judgment of G. K. [...]

Home Economics: Re-Imagining Distributism

By Daniel McInerny|2016-02-12T15:28:27-06:00April 9th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Daniel McInerny, Distributism, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc|

Distributism, as originally conceived by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, has long ceased being a practical possibility for the majority of those living in the liberal democracies of the West. Yet this does not mean that the core principle of distributism—widely distributed private ownership of the means of livelihood—is wholly beyond our reach. Chesterton, [...]

Conversations About the Highest Things

By James P. McGlone|2021-04-21T10:08:01-05:00February 10th, 2013|Categories: Books, Christianity, Fr. James Schall, G.K. Chesterton|Tags: 1MA|

Schall on Chesterton by James V. Schall If G. K. Chesterton is persistently ignored by much of the contemporary intellectual world, he has, I think, no one to blame but himself. After all, he insisted he was nothing but a journalist who wrote for his time, and he did not give a hoot for posterity’s opinion [...]

On Popular Fictions, Or How I Learned to Relax and Enjoy Downton Abbey

By Daniel McInerny|2016-02-12T15:28:30-06:00February 9th, 2013|Categories: Art, Books, Christianity, Culture, Daniel McInerny, Fiction, Film, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot|

Downton Abbey cast A friend of mine wrote on Facebook about Downton Abbey: “take away the English accents, the bucolic setting, the period costumes, and the antiquated moral code, and you’re left with Days of Our Lives. Some truth to that, I thought at first. Downton Abbey often suffers from severe melodramatic fits. [...]

Chesterton’s Library Resurrected

By Stephen Masty|2016-02-12T15:28:32-06:00January 13th, 2013|Categories: Books, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Libraries, Stephen Masty|

Much of Britain’s literary heritage may be found in America, from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C, to the manuscripts and letters of famous authors housed in wealthy universities from coast to coast. Not so for G. K. Chesterton’s own collection of his books and periodicals, and personal effects down to his hat, pince-nez [...]