“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.

“This [insistence that all people had dignity, and the most wretched especially] was the conviction that in 369, on the outskirts of a Caesarea ravaged by famine, prompted Basil to embark on a radical new building project. Other Christian leaders before him had built ptocheia, or ‘poor houses’ – but not on such an ambitious scale. The Basileias, as it came to be known, was described by one awestruck admirer as a veritable city, and incorporated, as well as shelter for the poor, what was in effect the first hospital. Basil, who had studied medicine while in Athens, did not himself scorn to attend the sick. Even lepers, whose deformities and suppurations rendered them objects of particular revulsion, might be welcomed by the Bishop with a kiss, and given both refuge and care. The more broken men and women were, the readier was Basil to glimpse Christ in them. The spectacle in a slave market of a boy’s sold by his starving parents, the one child sacrificed that his siblings might have some few scraps of food, provoked the bishop to a particularly scorching excoriation of the rich.... Basil's brother went even further. Gregory was moved by the existence of slavery not just to condemn the extremes of wealth and poverty, but to define the institution itself as an unpardonable offence against God. Human nature, so he preached, had been constituted by its Creator as something free. As such, it was literally priceless. ‘Not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.’… Gregory's abolitionism met with little support. The existence of slavery as damnable but necessary continued to be taken for granted by most Christians – Basil included..”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [but you have to start somewhere, and abolitionism more or less started here].

Modern evils “arise from the governing classes having too much liberty and the governed having less liberty than ever.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” (subhed “Church and State (not in that order)”) in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree with [the just-quoted Heinrich] Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself, to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Being funny has nothing to do with being untrue or undesirable.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News 14/9/1907, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw a connection between the mental paralysis of cultural relativism and the inability of Western nations to defend themselves militarily.

“Most people do not accumulate a body of experience. Most people go through life undergoing a series of happenings, which pass through their systems undigested. Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized.”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“Even as Poitiers was being fought, collections of sayings attributed to Muhammad were being compiled that, in due course, would come to constitute an entire corpus of law: Sunna. Any detail of Roman or Persian legislation, any fragment of Syrian or Mesopotamian custom, might be incorporated within. The only requirement was convincingly to represent it as having been spoken by the prophet – for anything spoken by Muhammad could be assumed to have the stamp of divine approval. Here, then, for Christians was a fateful challenge. Their time-honored conviction that the true law of God was to be found written on the heart could not have been more decisively repudiated. No longer was it the prerogative of Jews alone to believe in a great corpus of divine legislation that touched upon every facet of human existence, and prescribed in exacting detail how God desired men and women to live. The Talmud, an immense body of law compiled by Jewish scholars – rabbis – in the centuries prior to the Arab conquest of the Near East, had never threatened the inheritance of Paul’s teachings as the Sunna did. Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings. They had conquered a vast and wealthy empire, and aspired to conquer yet more. Had Francia gone the way of Africa, and been lost for good to Christian rule, then the Franks too would doubtless and eventually be brought to the Muslim understanding of God and his law. The fundamental assumptions that governed Latin Christendom would thereby have been radically and momentously transformed. Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realized it, but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of Saint Paul.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World