“Dear Mr. Chesterton,/ Isn’t one religion really just as good as another?/ Signed,/ ‘Level-Headed’/ Dear ‘Level-Headed,’/ How could it be? You have forgotten what religions are for, and have simply put the question wrong. You are asking me to choose, not even between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but between Hokey-pokey and Abracadabra. A religion is a thing which professes to tell the truth about the nature of the universe. How could any version of it be as true as any other, unless, of course, they are all of them in all respects false./ Your friend,/ G.K. Chesterton/ (Illustrated London News, Jan. 5, 1907; Gilbert Vol. 1, No. 6)”

“Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)

Re the 2nd-rate composers who get exposure on “In the Shadow on Tom Allen’s excellent CBC Radio program, Music and Company… One must learn to recognize the signposts of mediocrity in life which, as a friend intoned recently, is too short to drink bad wine…. Probably 90 per cent of the renovations in our major cities would qualify for a visual version of In the Shadow – cautionary tales of mediocrity rampant on a field of good intentions.”

William Thorsell in Globe & Mail June 2, 2003 [ironically the same William Thorsell who oversaw a dreadful renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum].

“The product of over-civilisation is shamelessness.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1908, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the federal Liberals, including Katie Telford in her Friday non-testimony, are violating Robson’s First Rule of Crisis Management over Chinese election meddling: When criticism erupts, take time to ponder honestly whether you did something wrong.

“Life resembles a game in which you are continually dealt ‘cards’ of enormously varied sorts, from very specific events or objects to rules large and small for playing the game. But some people are dealt things so horrifying that they never dare tell anyone they have them, and sit staring at them all through the game, not knowing how to play them or get rid of them, and hating them and the game.”

An insight that came to me in December 1987. [If you have such cards, trust the compassion of a fellow player and talk to them.]

“Working hard at something that doesn’t work doesn’t make it work.”

John Alston on PBS June 21, 1992

“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there and we can sing together, and shake our heads over all the meanness in the Used-To-Be.”

The last words of Buster Scruggs as he approaches heaven with his harp and the duet fades out, in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

“the decade that taste forgot”

Regarding the 1970s, and attributed to “one journalist” by David P. Deavel in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22) (in a piece saying the late Fr. James V. Schall “never succumbed to the 1970s habit too many of his Jesuit confreres had of wearing the intellectual and spiritual (not to mention sartorial) clothing of that decade”.