“In 1142, its [Cluny’s] great abbot, Peter the Venerable, had crossed the Pyrenees, the better to understand what the Saracens actually believed. Meeting with scholars fluent in Arabic, he had employed them on momentous project: the first translation of the Koran into Latin. Better persuasion than compulsion – such had always been Peter’s model. Sure enough, the translation delivered, he had addressed the Saracens directly, ‘not as our men often do, with arms, but with words, not with violence but reason, not with hate but love’. Yet these emollient sentiments have not prevented Peter from feeling thoroughly appalled by the Qur’an. No more monstrous a compound of heresies, confected as it was ‘from both Jewish fables and heretical teachers’, could possibly have been imagined. Even its vision of heaven blended gourmandising with sex. Cluny it was not. Far from building bridges, Peters translation of the Qur’an had only confirmed Christians in their darkest suspicions of its contents. Islam was the sump of all heresies, and Muhammad ‘the foulest of men’.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“The Boomers came of age in the initial, seemingly carefree days of the Sexual Revolution. That revolution’s holy grail, the pill, roared onto the scene in the 1960s. For the first time in history, it appeared, the male inclination to sexual adventuring would now no longer involve tradeoffs or consequences, since sex could be separated from childbearing. Chesterton famously observed that ‘The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.’ The Boomers believed at the time that they were entitled to ignore fact number two. In pursuit of this mirage of ‘freedom,’ they also discarded family ties and responsibilities. Patriotism evaporated and they abandoned God and the church in droves. The sweet Woodstock-infused air of a new Garden of Eden seemed just around the corner. But the Boomers, it turned out, had not heard the siren song embedded in the soothing melodies of the Sexual Revolution, which lured young men and women to emptiness and pain. In that dreamtime, many didn’t appreciate the price to be paid for that illusory ‘freedom’ – the objectification of women and the impaired ability of men to love in the sacrificial ways necessary to promote a rich, rewarding family life.”

Mark Johnson recoiling from Mick Jagger still touring at 80 and doing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024) [having seen the Stones with his wife in 1989 and her recoiling then].

“What more can we have on our side than the common sense of everybody?”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News 20/6/1903, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? – 5” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)

“Fr. Paul D. Scalia: ‘Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me.’ Perhaps we can hear in these words an invitation to couples to have more children. The young G.K. Chesterton once wrote a bit of doggerel that captures his love of the Christ-child and of childhood in general: ‘I would say to all parents/ Do you take things equally/ How do you know that you are not/ In the place of Joseph and Mary.’ Of course, those two things are profoundly related. Childhood wasn’t valued until God became a child. The ancient world didn’t have the same affection or sentimentality for children that we have. In both Aramaic and Greek, the word for child was the same as for servant. It’s not that the world thought children were delightful, and so God became a child. It’s rather that by becoming a child, God sanctified childhood and children.”

Start of email from The Catholic Thing Sept. 22, 2024

“Our educational authorities have already made sure that the system is rigid without making sure that it is right. They have already achieved universality but not unity. They have arranged to teach history without considering what history teaches; they have obtained powers of compulsion for teaching the truth to everybody; and then, looking into their own minds, have found that the truth is not in them.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 12, 1920 as a header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“Why should this [the inherent implausibility of the message, and the regular severe physical abuse he suffered for preaching it] have persuaded anyone in Galatia to accept the truth of Paul’s message? To abandon the cult of the Caesars was not merely to court danger, but to risk the very stitching that held together the patchwork society of the province’s cities. Yet some, for all this, did find the new identity proclaimed by Paul not a menace, but a liberation. The love felt by the Jewish God for his chosen people – so unlike anything displayed by the heedless gods of Galatia – had long aroused in Gentiles emotions of envy as well as suspicion. Now, by touring cities across the entire span of the Roman world, Paul set himself to bringing them the news of a convulsive upheaval in the affairs of heaven and earth. Once, like a child under the protection of a tutor, the Jews had been graced with the guardianship of a divinely authored law; but now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such guardianship was passed. No longer were the Jews alone ‘the children of God’. The exclusive character of their covenant was abrogated. The venerable distinctions between them and everyone else – of which male circumcision had always been the pre-eminent symbol – were transcended. Jews and Greeks, Galatians and Scythians: all alike, so long as they opened themselves to belief in Jesus Christ, were henceforward God’s holy people. This, so Paul informed his hosts, was the epochal message that Christ had charged him to proclaim to the limits of the world. ‘The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“They will tell you the modern world rebels against Religion. It rebels much more against Reason.”

G.K. Chesterton in Listener Feb. 20, 1935 quoted in “Reason and its Discontents” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Note the number of positive assertions made in the name of popular science, without the least pretence of scientific proof.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 12, 1930, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [and foretelling COVID, climate alarmism etc. with uncanny accuracy]