Orthodoxy: 20th Century (Twentieth Century Christian Classics)

Orthodoxy: 20th Century (Twentieth Century Christian Classics) Review

This book is pure brilliance. I only recently came across Chesterton as something more than a name I had heard. This is the first book by him that I have read, and I have to express awe and great pleasure with it. Chesterton has this wonderfully peculiar way of presenting a successive argument (in a light, almost flippant manner) that gains strength and cogency as it unfolds. Peppered within his arguments are statements that may often seem zany and funny at first, but that with more thought and concentration grow strikingly and reveal themselves to be potent catalysts for challenging long-held assumptions. Chesterton in this book puts old truths in new perspective. He succeeds admirably, and somewhat paradoxically, at turning conventional wisdom on its head and yet strengthening the very idea of convention in the process. We're living today in an age of waning traditional influences kind of like the one in which this book was written. But I invite skeptics of tradition and religion to give this book a try. They might find that Oliver Wendell Holmes's statement - about a mind never regaining its original dimensions once stretched by a new idea - applies to much of this book in ways they might not expect...or find comfortable.

Orthodoxy: 20th Century (Twentieth Century Christian Classics) Overview

Gilbert Keith Chesterton called himself a "pagan" at 12 and was agnostic by 16. He then developed a personal, positive philosophy that turned out to be orthodox Christianity. First published in 1908, when he was 35, this intellectual and spiritual autobiography combines simplicity with subtlety in a model apologetic for those who face the same materialism and anti-supernaturalism as the "man at war with his times".

Orthodoxy: 20th Century (Twentieth Century Christian Classics) Specifications

If G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith is, as he called it, a "slovenly autobiography," then we need more slobs in the world. This quirky, slender book describes how Chesterton came to view orthodox Catholic Christianity as the way to satisfy his personal emotional needs, in a way that would also allow him to live happily in society. Chesterton argues that people in western society need a life of "practical romance, the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." Drawing on such figures as Fra Angelico, George Bernard Shaw, and St. Paul to make his points, Chesterton argues that submission to ecclesiastical authority is the way to achieve a good and balanced life. The whole book is written in a style that is as majestic and down-to-earth as C.S. Lewis at his best. The final chapter, called "Authority and the Adventurer," is especially persuasive. It's hard to imagine a reader who will not close the book believing, at least for the moment, that the Church will make you free. --Michael Joseph Gross

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