“Toward the end of her life she [Dorothy Sayers] was to write, in the 1952 introduction to The Surprise, a forgotten play of Chesterton’s whose posthumous publication she instigated, ‘To the young people of my generation, G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in the gusts of fresh air in which the dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of Our Lady’s Tumbler.’”

John Hissong in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.”

Jonathan Haidt on The Free Press November 25, 2025 [https://www.thefp.com/p/jonathan-haidt-the-devils-plan-to-ruin-next-generation]. A position unlikely to attract devotees let alone martyrs.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that NATO meeting in Turkey instead of expelling it indicats a collapse of faith in the Western civilization NATO was created to protect.

Re the end of apartheid then communism: “Communism, weighed in the scales of history, had been found wanting. To [F.W.] de Klerk, pious Calvinist that he was, all this had manifestly appeared the writing of God’s finger on the affairs of the world. This was not, however, how it tended to be seen by policymakers in America and Europe. They drew a different lesson. That the paradise on earth foretold by Marx had turned out instead to be closer to a hell only emphasized the degree to which the true fulfillment of progress was to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism, it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Hindu, or confusion, or Muslim. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had arrived.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“I admit that the very best of the tea-table novels are great art – for instance, Emma, or Northanger Abbey. Sheer elemental genius can make a work of art out of anything. Michael Angelo might make a statue out of mud, and Jane Austen could make a novel out of tea – that much more contemptible substance. But on the whole I still think that a tale about one man killing another man is more likely to have something in it than a tale in which all the characters are talking trivialities without any of that instant and silent presence of death which is one of the strong spiritual bonds of all mankind. I still prefer the novel in which one person does another person to death to the novel in which all the persons are feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life. But I have another and more important quarrel about the sensational novel. There seems to be a very general idea that the romance of the tomahawk will be (or will run the risk of being) more immoral than the romance of the teapot. This I violently deny. And in this I have the support of practically all the old moral traditions of our civilization and of every civilization. High or low, good or bad, clever or stupid, a moral story almost always meant a murderous story. For the old Greeks a moral play was one full of madness and slaying. For the great mediaeval a moral play was one which exhibited the dancing of the devil and the open jaws of hell. For the great Protestant moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a moral story meant a story in which a parricide was struck by lightning or a boy was drowned for fishing on a Sunday. For the more rationalistic moralists of the eighteenth century, all agreed that shocking calamities could properly be indicated as the result of evil doing; that the more shocking those calamities were the more moral they were. It is only in our exhausted and agnostic age that the idea has been started that if one is moral one must not be melodramatic. Hence the novel of the tea table has passed the censor everywhere as a thing that cannot be really wrong because there are no murders in it. As a matter of fact I am prepared to wager that as much wickedness has been talked over a teapot as ever was talked over a witch’s cauldron.”

G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly 7/4/1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024).

“It is in such times that we are haunted by the old maxim, ‘Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ludicrous.’”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

His childhood faith gradually faded as he grew up. “Why, if God existed, had he allowed so many species to evolve, to flourish, and then utterly to disappear? Why, if he were merciful and good, had he permitted an asteroid to smash into the side of the planet, making the flesh on the bones of dinosaurs burst into flame, the Mesozoic seas to boil, and darkness to cover the face of the earth? I did not spend my whole time worrying about these questions; but sometimes, in the dead of night, I would. The hope offered by the Christian story, that there was an order and purpose to humanity’s existence, felt like something that had forever slipped my grasp. ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible,’ as the physicist Stephen Weinberg famously put it, ‘the more it also seems pointless.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“If any one of my works were a work of art, it would be very inartistic to defend it from critics. A work of art ought to be finished in every sense, good and bad; it should be either done well or done for, or both. This is true of art but not of argument; for I am happy to say that argument is never finished.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness 7/5/1920, quoted in unbylined “Art and Thought” compilation in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025) [my summary “Do it right or do it in” being, for once, worthy of GKC himself.