Attention Chestertonians

The Australian Chesterton Society and the G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture will be jointly sponsoring a conference with the theme Redeeming the Culture: The Reforming Vision of G.K. Chesterton. The conference will focus on the enduring value of Chesterton's thought, especially in light of the centenary of publication of Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday.

The conference will be on the weekend of June 30 - July 2 at Campion College and will be an excellent opportunity for younger Catholics to discover this giant of Catholicism as they prepare for World Youth Day. Speakers include Sheridan Gilley (Emeritus Reader in Theology, Durham University), Thomas Storck (Board Member of the Chesterton Review) and Karl Schmude (President of the Chesterton Society and guest speaker at the Library's own conference in 2006).

For further information please contact Karl by email on kschmude@northnet.com.au or phone on 0407721458.

In the News

In the first edition of the Library Newsletter for 2008:

• David Kehoe discusses "thinking with the mind of the Church" and the importance of the Library in forming the minds of Catholics.
• John Young reviews GK Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward by Stephen R L Clark
• Anna Krohn pays tribute to Bill Finnegan, the Library's bookbinder and repairer, who passed away late last year.

Also included is an insert advertising the first three Wednesday lunchtime talks for the year: Saving Unborn Babies with the Helpers of God's Precius Infants and An Approach to the Apostles with Br. Christian Moe.

People read old books, but they do not read old newspapers. The quaint old volume about heraldry and the Howards is sometimes picked up on the bookstall; but the newspaper-files ... have long ago been used to light the fire.

GK Chesterton in the Illustrated London News, November 12 1927

Towards the Ronald Knox Seminar

On Saturday October 6th 2007 the Library will be hosting a seminar to commemorate the life and literature of Msgr. Ronald Arbuthnott Knox: apologist, essayist, novelist, poet, scholar and translator.

Monsignor Knox believed the common man "has been standing at a point in the road where modernism opens out on one side, and, if you like, intellectual suicide on the other. He is looking nervously down each of these in turn; the one thing that never seems to occur to him is ... to go straight on. Let him trust orthodox tradition to determine what he is to believe, and common sense to determine what is orthodox tradition."

"Common sense", "orthodox tradition" - if you detect in these words an echo of GK Chesterton, then you might like to know that for Monsignor Knox "He had been my idol since I read the Napoleon of Notting Hill as a schoolboy" and "Chesterton's philosophy, in the broadest sense of that word, have been part of the air I breathed, ever since the age when a man's ideas begin to disentangle themselves from his education. His paradoxes have become, as it were, the platitudes of my thought."

Likewise Chesterton regarded Knox as having done the most to help him decide to become a Catholic and had written to him requesting instruction. It was only because of scheduling difficulties that Chesterton was instructed and received by Father John O'Connor, the inspiration for Father Brown. One wonders what might have been had it been Father Knox, especially since both were founding members of the Detective Club.

Thus it seems very appropriate for the Library to follow last year's seminar with one on this eloquent and original writer, whose name is forever immortalised in a poem written, incidentally, by Chesterton:

Mary of Holyrood may smile indeed,

Knowing what grim historic shade it shocks,

To see wit, laughter and the Popish creed

Cluster and sparkle in the name of Knox

FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE SEMINAR

WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE IN THE COMING WEEKS.

GK Chesterton on Classic Literature and Old Books

Reading through my copies of the Quotable Chesterton and More Quotable Chesterton I came across the following quotes which might serve as an apologia for the Library's continued existence.

The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one's last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to be old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone. (The Common Man, p. 22)

You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fact because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well. (The Common Man, p.23)

[Therefore] it does not give the man for whom the old things are stale any right to scorn the man for whom the old things are fresh. And there always are men for whom the old things are fresh. Such men, so far from being behind the times, are altogether above the times. They are too individual and original to be affected by the trivial changes of time. (Illustrated Daily News, October 6, 1928)