“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”

Eric Hoffer, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go

“It is now much discussed among the learned whether art should abolish morality by calling it convention. It might well be discussed among the wise whether art should even abolish convention. But what seems very queer to me is this: that modern art has so often abolished morality without abolishing convention.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News February 6, 1932, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22).

“Generally speaking, what I complain of in the historical philosophy of Mr. Wells is that it is always jam to-morrow and never jam to-day.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted in “Chesterton University” “An Introduction to the Writings of G.K. Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist” “G.K.’s Weekly, Volume 8 ■ September, 1928 – March, 1929” 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 mercifully now reversed decision by Moncton city council to ditch their traditional Hanukkah acknowledgement (and a nativity scene) reflects a dangerously mistaken understanding of the place of religion in a free society.

“Hatred is a dead end street, and I want to continue on down the road.”

Spiro Agnew Go Quietly... Or Else

“It is just not the case that, under the skin, the world’s religious are really all saying the same thing, and one can question whether the attempt to impose pluralism on the traditions does not lead, as Schwöbel says, ‘to a personal construction of the history of religious and religious attitudes that very few who participate in them would recognise as their own’. The driving force of much pluralist thought is the desire to iron out differences in the search for tolerance, but this ‘can all too easily turn into a new guise of Western imperialism where subscribing to the principles of the Enlightenment becomes a precondition for participation in dialogue’. The particularities of the traditions must be respected, for to ask an adherent to give up what are perceived as the central truths of a tradition in order to find accommodation within a sufficiently unfocused universality is ‘akin to asking a native speaker of English to please try and do without nouns, since we have reason to believe that using them leads to an inappropriately reified view of the world’. But neither, it seems to me, can we take the second option of an exclusivist approach and say the truth is with us and the others are just mistaken. Our contacts with the other traditions make clear to us that they are the vehicles of a profound spiritual experience and understanding.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist [the 2nd quotation might be Schwobel too as both are from the same book by D’Costa; the third is from P.J. Griffiths in the same book.]

“Tradition is only experience surviving death.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Leisure State” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

“It often happens in history that things intensely small and local, or even backward and barbaric, defend themselves with great success against empires and combines, simply because they are too remote to have been overawed by mere cosmopolitan rumour and reputation. There are some fortunate communities that are too ignorant to be bullied, too superstitious to be frightened, too poor to be bribed, and too small to be destroyed. It is probably in these minute and secret places that the seed of civilization will be preserved for future ages, through the blundering anarchy of big things which seems to be coming upon us.”

Apparently an excerpt from “The Problems with Progress” in G.K.’s Weekly Vol. 7 March-September 1928, quoted in “An Introduction to the writings of G.K. Chesterton” by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)