1. Growing International
interest in GKC
2. Discovery of hitherto unknown writings of
Chesterton on Aquinas
3. 'Chesterton for Today' in London on 10 November!
1. Growing international interest in G.K. Chesterton is attested by the success of two
international conferences of the G.K. Chesterton
Institute for Faith & Culture this summer, one in
Oxford and one in Vilnius, Lithuania, commemorating
his visit there in 1927. The Institute has been
asked to help organize others as far afield as Poland,
Uganda and Argentina. Chesterton societies are
also flourishing in the United States, Australia,
Japan and, of course, England, where the journalist
and playwright Gilbert Chesterton lived until his
death in 1936.
The Vilnius conference was opened and welcomed by his
Eminence Cardinal Audrys Juozas Backis, and the
President of Lithuania sent a message to greet the
delegates. Such was the intense interest
throughout the week from scholars, educators and
journalists in Lithuania that by the end of the
conference the Vice-Director of the National Library
offered to open a permanent reading room and to
establish a dedicated web site in the Library for the
Chesterton Institute to continue its work in the
region during the years to come.
What is it about Chesterton that so caught the
imagination of Lithuania? During the decades of
Soviet oppression, Chesterton's writings had been
circulated in samizdat. But Chesterton
had been equally critical of consumerist capitalism,
and that makes his social philosophy even more
relevant now that communism has fallen. He was a
dedicated opponent of Empires of all sorts and a
defender of small countries and local
traditions. He was a democrat who truly
represented the common man, rather than the oligarchs
and plutocrats who manipulate democracy in order to
maintain themselves in power. He was a
conservationist rather than a conservative, a radical
not a reactionary.
The best example of everything Chesterton stands for
was given in the conference by Remigijus Vilys, a
young musician who had transformed the lives of
countless deprived Lithuanian children by finding a
way to educate them as musicians. Children
without hope had discovered a sense of value and
destiny, their parents' view of them had been
transformed, and a new cultural tradition had been
born. Maybe we spend too much time trying to
reconstruct a culture that once existed, Vilys
concluded. What we should be doing is starting a
new one - starting from the needs of the people we
meet, and giving our time and creativity to answering
those needs. It was a lesson that underlined the
whole tenor of the conference, which far from looking
back nostalgically to a pre-Communist past was
confronting the real needs of one of the newest
members of the EU, and finding much-needed inspiration
in the work of an English writer whose ideas transcend
his own time and place.
The other major Chesterton Institute conference of the
summer had taken place a month previously at Christ
Church in Oxford, attended by delegates from Ireland,
Poland, Portugal, USA and western Canada as well as
the UK. 'Landscapes with Angels' examined the
current phenomenon of bestselling fantasy fiction,
both books and films, and the spiritual role of the
imagination. In the age of Tolkien, Rowling and
Pullman, it is increasingly through fantasy that
modern children receive their moral formation.
Conference speakers drew on stories and writers from Peter
Pan and Beatrix Potter through to David Almond and
William Nicholson, not to mention the current spate of
fantasy and superhero movies, to demonstrate the power
of imagination to illuminate the quest of the modern
soul for meaning and the battle for virtue that
accompanies it. The conference papers will
appear in The Chesterton Review during 2005.
2. A major new cache of unpublished Chesterton
writings on St Thomas Aquinas will be published in
the forthcoming issue of The Chesterton
Review. Among the Chestertonian memorabilia
acquired by the Institute in the last few years for
its Oxford library, Aidan Mackey discovered several
pages that turned out to be on Aquinas, but were not
either a distinct article or a draft of the book which
Chesterton published on the same subject in
1933. That book had been praised by the great
French Thomist, Etienne Gilson, in the following
terms: "I consider it as being without possible
comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas.
Nothing short of genius can account for such an
achievement." Yet it had been written in
the space of a few weeks, with a minimum of
research. Until now, apart from a brief article
in The Spectator, it was thought that
Chesterton had written nothing else on Aquinas.
The new writings appear in The Chesterton Review (Spring
and Summer 2004) with commentary and notes by Dr Mark
Armitage. This discovery will be of enormous
interest to the many readers of Chesterton around the
world, whose numbers are growing as more and more of
his books are reprinted, as well as to students of St
Thomas Aquinas.
3. You are invited to a Reception hosted
by The Chesterton Review to celebrate its
thirtieth anniversary year in the Crypt of St
Etheldreda's Church in Ely Place, 7-9 pm on Wednesday
10 November 2004. (Some parking available in Ely
Place.) Speakers will include Fr Ian Ker on
Chesterton as a successor to Newman, Russell Sparkes
(fund manager for the Methodist Church) on the Sane
Economy, and editors of the Review on the
vision of the Institute for a 'new kind of
liberalism'. For there are two kinds of
liberalism, and the wrong kind is winning. The
wrong kind of liberalism is individualistic, selfish,
utilitarian. It separates economy from nature,
culture and ethics, treating economic man as a machine
or a bundle of desires, a machine for producing and
consuming in ever-greater quantities regardless of
long-term cost to the environment or to man
himself. But there is an alternative liberalism
founded in a different vision of human nature, a
personalist liberalism that respects community, that
regards man as fundamentally cooperative rather than
competitive, and sees examples of that cooperation in
the cultures he creates in freedom - cultures of which
an economic system is just one expression. This
is the liberalism that is rooted in Christian teaching
about human dignity.
The Chesterton Institute is a foundation for cultural
renewal in the Christian humanist tradition. It
is based at Seton Hall University in New Jersey with
an editorial office and library in Oxford. Further
information from Stratford Caldecott, Chesterton
Institute, 6a King St, Oxford OX2 6DF. Email
<[email protected]> Web site: