“The portrait of mankind as painted by the cynical evolutionist is a dreary one. Draped in a ragged costume of skin and bones, driven by primeval instincts and chemical imbalances, this poor excuse for an organism provides us with little cause for celebration. They litter the continents with war and with industrialization, pollute the atmosphere, and eternally suffer under the horrors of famine and bloodshed. Yet the eyes of G.K. Chesterton spy wonders even in the midst of chaos.”

Monica Larkin, “Essay Award Winner, Chesterton Academy of the Twin Cities” Class of 2024, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

“In this article, I draw upon critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status. Specifically, I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy. Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States. Through several examples, I demonstrate how – since colonization – marriage fundamentalism has been instantiated through laws, policies, and practices to unduly advantage WHNFs while simultaneously marginalizing Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families, among others. I conclude with a call for family scientists to further interrogate how marriage fundamentalism reproduces family inequality in American family life and to work toward its dismantling. A deeper understanding of how these complex and often covert mechanisms of structural oppression operate in family life is needed to disrupt these mechanisms and advance family equality and justice.”

Bethany Letiecq in the Journal of Marriage and Family, “an official journal of the National Council on Family Relations”, quoted by Mark Pilon in “News with Views” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024); Pilon adds “GKC, on the style: Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say ‘The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,’ you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin ‘I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,’ you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word ‘damn’ than in the word ‘degeneration.’”

“I have noticed that, with few exceptions, men bungle their affairs. Everywhere I see incompetence rampant, incompetence triumphant.”

Raymond Hull’s introduction to Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seemed most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true, they will give us truth which we half knew already. Where they are false, they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there was any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we’re already committing; And their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not in dangerous. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation

“The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine if a grammatical mistake has been made.”

Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999 Vol. 7 # 6

“As the [c. March 1208 papal] interdict was declared, John ordered books to be sent from Reading Abbey, which were delivered by the hand of the abbey’s sacrist. John did not explain why he chose this moment to catch up on his reading, but it is worth considering what he wanted to have with him at a moment of extreme crisis for himself and for the kingdom. There were six volumes containing the whole of the Old Testament. This was a particular favorite of medieval kings since they liked to model themselves on the bellicose David in particular. The sacrist also brought Hugh of St. Victor’s On the Sacraments of the Faith, the greatest work of one of the greatest minds of the twelfth century; since the pope was withdrawing the” “sacraments from John and from his people, it is not surprising that Hugh’s book was on John’s reading list. There were also more esoteric works, including the Letter of Candidus to Marius Victorinus. Marius was an early Christian theologian who adapted Stoicism for Christian purposes: John would have to be stoical in the face of the pope’s onslaught, so this text was a good place in which to find inspiration. Another text that John had brought to him from Reading Abbey was Valerius Maximus’s Memorable Deeds and Sayings. Written in about AD 31 to provide moral guidance to his Roman readers, Valerius’s work covered such topics as Courage, Endurance, Determination and Self-Confidence, crucial for the coming struggle, along with some that John might have wished to pass over, such as Loyalty to Parents and to Brothers. The more standard works in the collection of books delivered to John included Peter Lombard’s Sentences (Quatuor libri Sententiarum), perhaps the leading theological work of the age, with the fourth book devoted to the seven sacraments and to the subjects of death, judgment, hell and heaven. John also received Origen’s treatise on the Old Testament, in which the author uses allegory to explain the text. In the minds of modern theologians, Origen’s methodology amounts to no more than reading into the text what one wishes to read into it, not quite making it up as one goes along, but not far short; the fact that John chose to read Origen perhaps gives us a further, unflattering insight into the king’s mind at this point in his life. The final selection was from the work Augustine of Hippo, including his City of God, a treatise that, amongst other things, notices that “all men desire to be happy” and then goes on to question what happiness might be. None of this is light reading and all of it suggests that there was some serious discussion under way in the close circles around the king concerning the impact of the interdict. John was applying his mind as well as his might to the problem.”

Stephen Church, King John: And the Road to Magna Carta

“The translator knows so much more Christian Greek than I that it would be out of place for me to praise her version. But it seems to me to be in the right tradition of English translation. I do not think the reader will find here any of that sawdusty quality which is so common in modern renderings in the ancient languages.”

C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. That’s why I found as a tutor in English literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if you only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; But hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St Luke or St Paul or St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.”

C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation