Chesterton: Thoughts and Perspectives, Volume Thirteen

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GIBLERT KEITH CHESTERTON was one of the great masters of English literature and his impact upon the radical politics and economics of the early twentieth century was nothing short of monumental. A prodigious and unremitting talent, G.K. Chesterton wrote more than eighty books and continues to inspire and captivate modern readers with his enduring witticisms, flowing poetry, curious paradoxes and uncompromising apologetics. Chesterton is probably best remembered for his popular journal, G.K.'s Weekly, as well as his unswerving devotion to Catholicism, to which he finally converted in 1922. Together which his great friend and ally, Hilaire Belloc , he formed the Distributist League as a dynamic alternative to the destructive ideologies of Capitalism and Marxism. Chesterton, who invited accusations of anti-Semitism when he famously praised King Edward I for having expelled crooked Jewish financiers from English shores in 1290, participated in a series of thrilling debates with some of the other leading philosophers and social commentators of the time, among them the playwright George Bernard Shaw and novelist H.G. Wells . Towards the end of his life, meanwhile, Pope Pius XI made him Knight Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great and there is an ongoing campaign to have the author beatified. Some of G.K. Chesterton's best-loved works include Charles Dickens , The Napoleon of Notting Hill , The Club of Queer Trades , Heretics , The Man Who Was Thursday , Orthodoxy , All Things Considered , Tremendous Trifles , The Ball and the Cross , What's Wrong with the World , The Ballad of the White Horse , The Flying Inn , A Short History of England , The Man Who Knew Too Much , Eugenics and Other Evils , St. Francis of Assisi , Tales of the Long Bow , The Everlasting Man , The Outline of Sanity , The Poet and the Lunatics , All I Survey , St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox , Avowals and Denials , Autobiography , As I Was Saying , and the extremely popular Father Brown stories. Topics discussed in the present work include "Neither Progressive nor Conservative: The Anti-Modernism of G.K. Chesterton", "Discovering England: Dialogues on Orthodoxy", "Alfredian Odyssey: An Examination of G.K. Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse", "Learning from the Cave-men: Chesterton's View of Man and his History", "Symbolum Apostiolicum: Chesterton's Dreamworld", "A Third Way Which is Right", "The Importance of Chesterton Today", and "Eugenics as a Manifestation of Modernity: A Chestertonian Critique". The contributors are Troy Southgate , K.R. Bolton, Keith Preston, John Howells, Stephen M. Borthwick, Dimitris Michalopoulos and Adam Berčík.