Posts in Philosophy
Words Worth Noting - July 13, 2025

“Gilbert’s history of man’s story [G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man] has the life of Jesus as the focal point of the world, the ‘crisis of history.’ The development of the Roman Catholic Church is the guiding line throughout history, a guide by which we can judge progress and advancement. Science has no place here, other than as a by-product of the spiritual centre, and man is no more near perfection in 1920 then he was in 1290. There has always been a path to heaven, and a road to somewhere else.”

Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

The morning after in politics

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say all the excitement about Zohran Mamdani is misplaced, not because he isn’t potentially important but because what matters isn’t whether he wins a primary or even the New York general mayoral election. It’s what happens if and when he tries to govern and what the result tells us about the soundness or insanity of his principles.

Words Worth Noting - July 2, 2025

“Indeed, I think it [the turn to autocracy or worse because of the failings of democracy especially under “the Party System”] is part of the one big blunder that is at the back of all our blunders. It is hard to put it shortly, except by calling it the blunder of being Practical. Perhaps the nearest word is Opportunism; but it is not the sane opportunism that takes all opportunities to advance a great thing; it is the nervy and panicky opportunism that accepts all the small things because they have more opportunities. It is this yielding to the apparently practical that has ruined everything.”

G.K. Chesterton “The True Fascist Fallacy” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

Words Worth Noting - June 28, 2025

“I go slap through a roomful of MSS., criticizing deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS. to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”

G.K. Chesterton writing to E.C. Bentley (the Clerihew guy) in 1895 describing his workday and the various tasks he undertakes for a publishing house, Redway, including clearing a backlog of manuscripts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

Words Worth Noting - June 26, 2025

“Running along both sides of the building’s arcade, a series of verses disparaged the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God.’ This was not merely to reopen theological debates that Christians had thought settled centuries before, but to condemn the entire New Testament, Gospels and all, as a fabrication. Squabbles among those who had written it, so the Dome of the Rock sternly declared, had polluted the original teachings of Jesus. These, like the revelations granted prophets before him, Abraham, and Moses, and David, had originally been identical to those for claimed by Muhammad. There was only the one true deen, the one true expression of allegiance to God, and that was submission to him: in Arabic, islam. Here was a doctrine with which ‘Muslims’ – those who practice islam – were already well familiar. It was not only to be found emblazoned on buildings. Most of the verses on the Dome of the Rock derived from a series of revelations that Muhammad’s followers believed had been given him by none other than the angel Gabriel. These, assembled after his death to form a single ‘recitation’ or qur’an, constituted for his followers what Jesus represented to Christians: an intrusion into the mortal world, into the sublunar, into the diurnal, of the divine.... This gave its pronouncement on Christians, as on everything else, an awful and irrevocable force.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World