Some Thursday Readings

No, Taylor Swift is not Mary Shelley – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.  

Left in the Rain – poem by Renee Emerson at Story Warren.

 

Remember when Atlanta’s eastside was a battlefield? – Thomas Wheatley at Axios.

 

No Mystery: The Enduring Appeal of Inspector Maigret – Adam Hill at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Ranked: Average Working Hours by Country – Marcus Lu at Visual Capitalist.

 

Story Only God Could Write: One Church Transforms Lives of 77 Kids Without Families – Billy Hallowell at Faithwire.

 

The Wise Men – poem by G.K. Chesterton at Rabbit Room Poetry. 

Painting: Mary Shelley, oil on canvas (1840) by Richard Rothwell (1800-1868). 

Some Thursday Readings

Words, words, words: On the Bard’s 400-hundred-year legacy – Amit Majmudar at New Criterion. 

Memory – poem by G.K. Chesterton at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

That crayon – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

 

“Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

When Life Betrays You, Only Love Remains – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book review on The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

 

Afghan Terror’s Return – Jeffrey Gedmin at American Purpose.

 

Rogue Prosecutors and the Rise of Crime – Cully Stimson at Imprimis / Hillsdale College.

 

Redcar Collector, a Dark Teeside short story by Glenn McGoldrick, is free today on Amazon.

 

Painting: The Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, circa 1600-1610, attributed to John Taylor. 

'Defiant Joy' by Kevin Belmonte

Everything about G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) seems to have been oversized. He was famous for his physical size. His literary insights were recognized almost as soon as he began writing and publishing. He was considered a master of the paradox, and he was difficult to best in a debate. His interests ranged from detective fiction to Catholic saints, and he is still unsurpassed for his understanding of Charles Dickens. 

I first “met” Chesterton via his Father Brown mystery stories. Beginning in 1911 and continuing until his death in 1936, Chesterton wrote 53 of the stories. Over the years, the priestly detective has been featured in numerous film, radio, and television adaptations, and even in manga. But the stories are really only an introduction to the Broader Chesterton, and they served me as a bridge to his literary studies, biographies, and other works. 

His works are still widely read today, more than 80 years after his death. He was a philosophical adversary of George Bernard Shaw, but they were also close friends, and Shaw mourned his friend’s death. Chesterton has a more than significant influence on C.S. Lewis, and Lewis acknowledged that it was reading Chesterton that started him down the road to faith. A thriving Chesterton Societystill exists today, comprised of his admirers from around the world. And Chesterton still sounds contemporary; the issues he debated and confronted are similar to the issues of our own day.

Biographies have been written over the years, most notably by Garry Wills in the 1961 Chesterton. Writer Kevin Belmonte, in Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesterton, has written a literary biography that focuses less on the details of Chesterton’s life and more on his major works. It’s an excellent introduction, originally published in 2011.

Belmonte tells his story chronologically, and tells the main facts of the man’s life, but he focuses on Chesterton’s works. We’re introduced to his journalism, of which there was a prodigious amount; the literary studies that first captured the critics’ praise; his book entitled Heretics; his deep understanding of Dickens; Orthodoxy, one of his most famous books; the Father Brown mysteries; his famous poem of England, The Ballad of the White Horse; his biographies of Chaucer, St. Francis, and St. Thomas Aquinas; and his account of his travels in North America, What I Saw in America. 

Belmonte provides summary of the works as well as the critical responses, setting each in its historical and literary context. He allows Chesterton and his critics (good and bad) to speak for themselves, quoting long passages of reviews and Chesterton’s responses. In short, Defiant Joy is everything you hope a literary biography to be, creating an understanding of an important literary and cultural influence who was nothing short of brilliant.

Kevin Belmonte

Belmonte received his B.A. degree in English from Gordon College, an M.A. degree in Church History from Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and an M.A. degree in American and New England Studies from the University of Southern Maine. He works include D.L. Moody: A Life: Innovator, Evangelist, World Changer; A Year with G.K. Chesterton: 365 Days of Wisdom, Wit and Wonder; William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity (with Charles Colson); The Quotable Chesterton; A.J. Gordon: An Epic Journey of Faith and Pioneering Vision; Miraculous: A Fascinating History of Signs, Wonders and Miracles; A Journey through the Life of William Wilberforce; John Bunyan; and Called to a Different Purpose: The Story of Robert Fulton and His Vision for Web Industries.

Defiant Joy provides great insight into the works of one of the most original minds of modern times. It’s an excellent reference, worth reading again and again, and has already inspired me to go back and reread my favorite Chesterton works.

In Praise of the Mystery Story: The Problem of Good

I’ve been reading the Sidney Chambers mysteries by James Runcie, a series of books on an Anglican vicar near Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s that’s the basis for the popular Grantchester mysteries on PBS. While it’s not as apparent in the television shows, Runcie’s stories do more than offer interesting mysteries with an engaging amateur detective. The stories typically pose theological questions, as Chambers wrestles with faith, doubt and the various issues that people of faith contend with.

I was reading Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil (review next week) when a not terribly original thought entered my head. We hear so much about the problem of evil. Why does (or would) God allow evil? What do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow a small child to get cancer? Why earthquakes and tornadoes? Why Hitler and Stalin? Why ISIS?

The not terribly original thought was that perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. What if the real question wasn’t about all the evil that God allows in the world, but all the good? Why is there so much good in the world?

I went looking for some answers.

A Presbyterian pastor, D. Marion Clark, published The Problem of Good: When the World Seems Fine Without God in 2014. A collection of essays by different writers, it takes a different view than the one I’m pursuing. The essays are more aimed at trying to explain why good seems to exist just fine without God.

Amazon has that one entry when you query “the problem of good.” Substitute “the problem of evil,” and you get 100 pages of entries. We Christians tend to be preoccupied with the question of evil, because it that set of questions from non-Christians that are perplexing without resorting to an in-depth lecture of the fall, original sin, marred creation, and related topics.

Why is there so much good in the world?

I found an answer that was intriguing because it went directly to a more basic issue: how do we know the difference between good and evil? What is it that says something is good, like helping the poor or sick, and something is bad, like gossip or physically attacking a person?

Most of us would focus on consequences or results – but bad things can often flow from good intentions (and we need look no further than our own federal government for untold numbers of examples).

Author and Christian apologist Greg Koukl concisely addressed my question in a blog post three years ago. We know the difference between good and evil because there is a pre-existing moral standard. Even if we are the most ardent of atheists or agnostics, we acknowledge that standard every time we raise the question of “why evil?”

I didn’t expect a mystery story to take me down a theological path, even a mystery story involving a vicar, but it did. It also reminded me that G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries did much the same thing when they were written beginning a century ago.

Some mystery stories can possibly double as theological treatises.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Chesterton on Poetry

In A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Made to Live, author Emily Freeman quotes G.K. Chesterton on the difference between poetry and reason.

“Poetry is sane,” Chesterton says, “because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion…To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

The first time I read that, I thought two things: first, it sounded just like Chesterton. And second, it appeared to be a salvo in the religion versus science debate. But on reflection, I don’t think it’s that at all. In fact, it makes perfectly good sense.

I just finished reading The Adam Quest by Tim Stafford, in which he profiles 11 scientists exploring human origins who also happen to be Christians. The 11 cross the range of understanding, from ardent creationists to equally ardent evolutionists. But whether it was Stafford’s unstated intention or not, they all sounded more like poets than they did what we think of as scientists. None of them sounded like someone seeking “to get the heavens into his head” (and not all were male, I should note).

What I think Chesterton is actually contrasting here is faith and reason, and he is putting the poets, and poetry, on the faith side of the ledger. The fact is that we, as the general mass of humanity, will never actually be able to “know everything.” Poets understand this, have made peace with it, and are comfortable floating in that “infinite sea.”

Those Chesterton calls logicians are not comfortable with this. They reject the notion of the infinite, replacing it with the “finite if not yet known.” They are confident all can be and will be made known.

It occurs to me that this may be another way of saying that logicians seek to understand and control, while poets seek to understand and accept. This is not an argument against science; far from it. But it is an argument against a certain kind of philosophy and belief, one that often shows up in the workplace. It includes the notion that we can control everything that happens in our work environment.

Freeman considers this idea of Chesterton’s, and recognizes there’s more to it than a surface reading (and I’ve only touched upon it here). She suggests we become comfortable with the idea of floating upon the infinite sea, and “show up within your limits.” Know yourself. Show up human. Show up authentic because, ultimately, it is our only choice.

“Showing up where you are with what you have is all you can do,” Freeman says.

The rest is pretense, and possibly self-deception.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing A Million Little Ways. Today’s post will be live at 2 p.m. Central time. Please visit to see what others are saying about the chapters on showing up, waiting, and offering.

Flannery O'Connor and the Avoidance of Celebrity

I can pinpoint the year I first read Flannery O’Connor. It was 1976, I was 24 going on 25, and a new person had joined the Public Affairs Department at Shell Oil where I worked. She came from a well known Houston family, had lots of eccentric relatives and was an extraordinarily fine writer. She and I talked about Shell, the oil industry, relatives, literature and writing; most of all, writing.

She was shocked that I hadn’t read Flannery O’Conner.

I started with Three by Flannery O’Connor, which included The Violent Bear It Away, Wise Blood and A Good Man is Hard to Find. From there I went to The Complete Stories, and then to Mystery and Manners, which included her essays and speeches. Finally, I read The Habit of Being, her letters collected and published in 1979, 15 years after her death from lupus.

There are all kinds of stories about Miss O’Connor, some true and many apocryphal. One that could be true or untrue is that John Kennedy O’Toole left New Orleans to drive to Georgia to see her, learned she had died some years before, and killed himself, leaving his manuscript for his mother to worry over. His mother did, made a huge pest of herself, and finally convinced Walker Percy to read it. The manuscript became A Confederacy of Dunces and won the Pulitzer Prize.

O’Connor’s works were – are – extraordinary. She is often considered a Southern writer, and she is that in the sense she was born and lived in the South. But she is more than that, too.

Her writing bears the likeness of William Faulkner but in a wholly original way. She is a kind of heir to Faulkner, particularly in the sense of having challenged the norms of literature and writing.

But, as if not more importantly, she is also the heir to G.K. Chesterton. Like him, she was Catholic. As author Bret Lott points out in an essay on O’Connor in the most recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, she is a Catholic writer even more than she is a Southern writer, and that’s something not normally taught in the English classes where her stories are studied.

Lott says something else in his essay (not available online, unfortunately) that strikes me as profoundly true: you will not find her in her stories. When you read one of her stories, you forget who’s written it; the point is the story, not the author. In an age of instant and often fleeting celebrity, her stories still resonate – and one of the reasons may very well be that she refused to be one. For her, the story, not the author, was the story, and she was not very patient with questions about what stories meant or what different aspects or elements or plot devices or characters were really about. She would tell such questioners to “read the story.”

She had a model for this, of course, and that was Jesus. He spent 33 years on this planet, and then physically removed himself from the Christian narrative – the narrative that he is still the point of. In many ways, the fact that he’s physically removed makes the mystery all the greater and all the more important, and he’s left us his story to study, to tell and to live. And one day he’ll return to complete it.

It was that mystery that defined O’Connor’s writing. She’s been dead for 48 years, but her influence has, if anything, grown in the intervening years. She left us with a number of remarkable stories, stories that “tell” just as well now as they did when she first published them.

This post was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but they revamped the site and the archive disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting a few of the articles.

A Poem for Christmas

A favorite Christmas poem of mine is by a favorite writer of mine, Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton. Chesterton (1874-1936) was likely the most productive writer of his time, if not all times. He wrote novels, essays, newspaper and magazine articles, biographies (including ones of Charles Dickens and Francis of Assisi that are still read and admired), broadsides and apologetics. A large man physically, he was larger than life in virtually every field he involved himself in. And he wrote poetry, including a poem for Christmas.

To continue reading, please visit my new post at The Master’s Artist.

Lewis Channels Chesterton

I first encountered G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) in the Father Brown mystery stories and The Man Who Was Thursday. There my acquaintance stayed for a while, until I was browsing a used book store and found his critical study of Charles Dickens. And then his biographies of Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. And then Orthodoxy, Heretics and The Napoleon of Notting Hill. And there’s more.

Chesterton wrote fiction, poetry, plays, philosophy, biography, literary and art criticism, fantasy, apologetics, and journalism, among a lot of other things. His writing output was legendary. He had a brilliant mind, and he used it in his writing and speeches.

He was known as the “prince of paradox,” and no more so than in his friends. He could (and did) argue with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells loudly and publicly, but he formed lasting friendships with both men. He could puncture the balloon of pomposity faster than anyone, but was also the master of self-deprecating humor.

I thought of Chesterton while reading the chapter in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity entitled “The Rival Conceptions of God.”

“If you are a Christian," Lewis says, "you do not have to believe that all other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.”

Chesterton could have written that. It is full of the paradox that Chesterton was so famous for.

What Lewis is saying here is that it takes more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian, that Christians – supposedly those horribly “exclusionary” and “non-pluralistic” people – can actually have a more liberal view toward other religions than atheists can have. And that’s because they can see elements of Christian truth in those religions (note: it doesn’t work the other way).

The paradox: it’s the atheists who are so doctrinaire and narrow-minded (or at least this is the conclusion Lewis would lead us to).

Lewis knows of what he speaks here. He’d been an atheist; his argument against God was that “the universe seemed so cruel and unjust.” But then he wondered where he got the idea of “cruel and unjust” from, because “ a man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.” His atheism turned out to be “too simple.”

Chesterton could have said that, too.

I can’t recall if Lewis and Chesterton ever actually met or knew one another, but whether they did or not, the two men had much the same to say about Christianity, atheism and faith. And they both knew a good paradox when they saw one.


This post is part of an online discussion about Mere Christianity, hosted by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter. To see more posts in the discussion, please visit Jason's blog, Connecting to Impact.