Pelikan, Poledouris, and Friedman

With the passing of 2006 some three weeks ago, I wanted to post a remembrance of three men who passed away in 2006. All were at the top of their fields and will be greatly missed by many:

Jaroslav Pelikan, 7 Dec 1923 – 13 May 2006. Pelikan received his PhD at 22 and spent four decades as a Professor at Yale. His five-volume magnus opus, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, was one of the greatest scholarly enterprises of the last century. I also highly recommend Jesus through the Centuries, Mary through the Centuries, and Whose Bible is it? Although a Lutheran for most of his life, returning to his eastern roots Pelikan joined the Orthodox Church in 1998, stating he "returned to it, peeling back the layers of my own belief to reveal the Orthodoxy that was always there." His deep knowledge of Christian doctrine, second to none, and his ultimate adoption of Orthodoxy make Pelikan an invaluable source of ‘unbiased’ information for many of the doctrinal issues I’ve pondered over the years. I am currently reading one of his last books, The Bible and the Constitution. An interview with him concerning publication of his introduction to Christian Creeds is available here and a video lecture concerning Christianity and Islam is available here.

Basil Poledouris, 21 Aug, 1945 - 8 Nov, 2006. Powerful and intricate, his movie scores are among the best ever composed. The score for Conan the Barbarian is my favorite of all time. Using very little dialogue throughout the film, director John Milius relied mostly upon the emotional content of Poledouris’ score to draw the viewer into the story.

Milton Friedman, 31 July, 1912 – 16 Nov, 2006. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, Milton is the man most responsible for rescuing the world from Keynesian economics. The Economist called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it" and Alan Greenspan stated “There are very few people over the generations who have ideas that are sufficiently original to materially alter the direction of civilization. Milton is one of those very few people.” His ideas on Capitalism and free markets guided by minimal governmental interference are a bright light for the future freedom of economic man.

Blueneck's Guide to Christian Symbolism

Merry Christmas MMVI! May the blessings of Christ be upon you on this anniversary of His incarnation.

One thing that has struck me this year is the total disregard of the majority of the population here in once-Great Britain toward the proper etiquette of winter holiday title usage. For goodness sake, real damage could be done! Perhaps the airlines should warn passengers travelling from metropolitan areas of the United States to cover their children's ears, lest some ignorant well-wisher disrupt her/his/its secular development with the "C" word. Perhaps British Airlines could use the woman who is no longer permitted to wear a "crucifix" at work despite the montage of tribal religious symbols now on display at every major British airport.

Speaking of Nadia Eweida, I have intended to post something about this for quite some time. Despite what you may think, I am not going to ramble on at length about the de-Christianization of Western society (for that, see above). No, the real story here is the invincible ignorance of the press regarding matters of religion and faith, and most other things besides. Time and again throughout Ms. Eweida's appeal to display the Christian symbol, the press referred to the item of jewellery as a "crucifix", despite showing a picture of Ms. Eweida wearing a plain cross with no corpus attached. Although this may seem a rather trivial error, the distinction is one that no uneducated person reared in the most nominally Christian country should miss. Is it possible that not a single reporter or editor remains at these outlets who knows the difference between a cross and a crucifix?

It is thus with great sorrow that I include the following "Blueneck's Guide to Christian Symbolism":

Ms. Eweida's cross

A crucifix

A cross

Did you put down the Latte long enough to get that?

Proverbs 26:11

Proverbs 26:11

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween 2006 from the Renfros!
Check out the flaming pumkins here.

Also, pictures from my brother-in-law Colin I'Anson's stag weekend are now online here.

Austria

Well, Morag and I just got back from Austria. We had a great time travelling around. I got to see the imperial treasury in Vienna containing the regalia of the Holy Roman Empire such as the imperial crown from the Ottonian dynasty, the Holy Lance from the Carolingian, a ceremonial sword created for the crowning of Emperor Frederick II and the Sword of St Maurice (not to be confused with the similar Sword of St Maurice now residing in Turin, Italy), and a coronation mantle made for Roger II of Sicily. I missed the Schatzkammer last time I was in Vienna, so I was very thankful of the opportunity to see it this time around.

Morag enjoyed visiting her friend Pia in Vienna, as well as going on the "Sound of Music" tour in Salzburg and going to the Marionette Theatre . We did get to do some hiking up to a waterfall near Golling. Pia introduced us to Sturm, a fermented grape drink somewhere between grape juice and wine which is definitely worth a try. Castle Hohenwerfen is also worth a visit, with stunning views and a falconry exhibit. All in all it was a good holiday and a much needed break from working loads of overtime and weekends!

If you would like to see pictures from our holiday, they are currently available here.

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Posted by Ryan to Ryan and Morag at 9/22/2006 02:10:00 AM

Ibog

Reason #543 that the Ipod is entirely too popular:


Might I sugest that 70's classic "Takin' Care of Business" by Bachman-Turner Overdrive?

6/6/6

Today is 6/6/6 and there is apparently a party in Hell, Michigan. I don't know if it's a hot day there, but it certainly is uncomfortably warm here in Edinburgh. Speaking of Hell, there is one in Norway as well. Here's a humourus sign brought to my attention several years ago by Nils Sandberg:

'Gods Expedition' is the old Norse spelling for cargo handling office. The town has reportedly been deserted since the Harrowing.

What's wrong in our country right now

The Salt Lake Tribune reported this from a notably small anti-war rally held in Salt Lake City:

"Jacob Floyd, a 22-year-old Brigham Young University student, said he was thinking of the future when he decided to attend.
"I came today because I want to tell my kids I did everything I could to stand up for what's wrong in our country right now," he said.
Floyd announced his politics on his chest, thanks to a homemade white T-shirt with the headline "They lied" over the faces of administration officials, including Bush and Cheney, and the words "They died" over a list of names of dead U.S. soldiers."

I couldn't agree more, Mr. Floyd. I couldn't agree more.

Ready for California

It's two weeks until Morag and I come to California - not a minute too soon:



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Posted by Ryan to Ryan and Morag at 3/10/2006 11:43:00 AM

Morag's Birthday

Well, the Princess of Pilgrims Hill will be 26 years young tomorrow. Happy Birthday, Princess Morag!

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Posted by Ryan to Ryan and Morag at 2/16/2006 02:16:00 PM

Jesusland Revisited

I thought I would update the Jesusland map following the Canadian election several weeks ago:

Nota Bene

Great quote from George Will's latest column:

"Regarding cynicism, Jimmy Carter, an even worse ex-president than he was a president, responded to the Hamas victory by quickly suggesting a way to evade the U.S. law against providing funds to terrorists. He suggested that the executive branch of the U.S. government could launder money destined for Hamas, passing it through the United Nations. This suggestion has a certain piquancy, coming as it does from someone who was elected president as a national penance for President Nixon's lawlessness, and coming as it does after the oil-for-food program in Iraq, which demonstrated the United Nations' financial aptitude."

also:

Kyoto’s Seppuku: It looks like the world most ridiculous treaty has been emasculated by those nations supporting it. It looks like the only thing this treaty will ever accomplish is releasing tons more CO2 into the atmosphere as diplomats jaunt across the globe to meetings, at which they agree to more pre-arranged meetings and all on your tax dollar.

An article about the Asia-Pacific rivals at the Asian Wall Street Journal with a great quote by Indian Environment Minister Andimuthu Raja: “economic growth and the elimination of poverty must take precedence over mitigating the effects of climate change.” The choice between starving at current temperatures or eating when it’s a bit warmer outside is not a difficult one for many of the world’s poor.

Speaking of CO2, it appears that interest is growing in nuclear energy internationally. Looks like the environmentalist movement might loose the battle to prevent us from using the only practicle solution yet available to the carbon emmissions crisis which they have fabricated. We applaud this development.

The Independent reports that Russia is working on plans to mine the moon for helium 3, an isotope which might be used to power thermo-nuclear power stations for the next thousand years. Rare on earth, there is believed to be between one and five hundred million tons on the moon. American scientist have also expressed interest, stating that “one shuttle-load of the isotope would be sufficient to meet US electrical energy needs for a year.” Now we just have to master fusion…

And on the lighter side, the Onion reports Nation's Snowmen March Against Global Warming.

Support the Spear-Danes

‘Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.’

‘So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.’

It seems the Spear-Danes have made their way back into the news. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten has recently published a number of depictions of the prophet Mahomet following a Danish author’s failed attempts to find an artist willing to illustrate his children’s book on the Islamic prophet. Although one cartoon depicted him with a bomb as a turban, the subject of the collection was clearly free speech. The illustrations were later republished in Norway. It seems this illustration has caused quite an uproar in the middle east, where images of the prophet are banned. Danish flags were burned in Palestine (stockpiles of American and Israeli flags were running low) and the Kuwaiti and Saudi governments have issue protests, while retailers pulled Danish products from their shelves. In fact, retailers are even advertising this fact.
Arab governments are now calling on the UN to pass a resolution banning attacks on religious beliefs. A deputy secretary-general of the Arab League explained:

"Consultations are currently taking place at the highest level between Arab countries and the OIC to ask the UN to adopt a binding resolution banning contempt of religious beliefs and providing for sanctions to be imposed on contravening countries or institutions.”

Wait, I though it was the Islamic countries that don’t allow rival religions to evangelize in their countries, that blow up ancient monuments built by other faiths, and whose media regularly publishes anti-Jewish cartoons and literature (Arabs are a Semitic people and it’s a bit of a misnomer to call Islamic Jew-hatred anti-Semitism.) It seems the first area of enforcement of such a law would be the Arab nations now pushing for it. Just imagine the effects of such world-wide censorship: Richard Dawkins could be imprisoned and the United Kingdom place under sanctions for his documentary savaging all religious beliefs as the root of all evil, American Jewish organizations banned for their criticism of the Passion while Mel Gibson is imprisoned for anti-Semitism, the US removed from the Security Council for playing reruns of South Park.
For a brief history of depictions of Mahomet put together by another blogger, including some made recently and sold openly in Iran to a Norwegian scientist, as well as the ones published in Denmark, look here. And remember to drink a Carlsberg, eat some Havarti cheese, and buy the kids some Legos. Here’s to Denmark’s ‘courage and greatness’ – may it survive their honour killings.

Swing votes and Ideologues

Sen. John Kerry, who lost his 2004 bid for the US presidency despite his service in Vietnam, has recently echoed the thoughts of many Democrats (synonyms: progressives, socialists, the mainstream media, etc.) in stating “We can't afford to see the court's swing vote, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, replaced with a far-right ideologue like Samuel Alito.” Their argument is that you cannot replace a ‘swing’ vote with a partisan one, and that we must somehow retain the current ideological or philosophical balance of the court. I suspect that had Sen. Kerry - highly acclaimed for his steadfast consistency - been elected to the presidency, he would have replaced the strict-constructionist Chief Justice Rehnquist with a similarly-minded Sam Alito or John Roberts, and would currently be pursuing a ‘swing’ vote for the O’Connor vacancy.

Such concern for the ideological balance of the court was displayed by the last Democrat president, Bill Clinton. During his administration, Clinton made two additions to the court. He replaced Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee. Blackmun authored the majority opinion on Roe v. Wade in 1973, beginning a drift to the left as he gradually betrayed expectations that he would interpret the Constitution conservatively. Clinton’s pick for this conservative-turned-liberal seat was Stephen Breyer, one of the liberal justices on the court today. Breyer was confirmed by a vote of 87 to 9. Clinton’s other appointment was for the Byron White seat. White and Rehnquist were the only dissenters from the original Roe decision and Tim LaHaye, author of the popular rapture fiction series, called White the only true conservative justice to serve during his lifetime. Clinton thus had no qualms about replacing one of the most conservative justices with a liberal – and probably in the superlative – justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When the Senate performed its ‘Advice and Consent’ function for Justice Ginsburg, she avoided most questions on her personal views. She was confirmed by a 96 to 3 vote to a formerly conservative seat.

When we compare this with the recent Republican nominees, we find a trend developing following the borking of Robert Bork in 1987. Scalia had been nominated the year before by a vote of 98-0. The Bork debacle appears to have changed the dynamics of court appointments. Moderate nominees such as "stealth justice" David Souter or Reagan’s compromise candidate for the Bork position, Anthony Kennedy, have passed the Senate by a vote of 90 to 97, respectively. The liberal nominees mentioned above passed by 87 to 96 votes. The problem is with the conservative nominees, which is to say with the liberal senators. Clarence Thomas was subjected to the same media prostate examination as Bob Bork, narrowly beating back his accusers – groups whose mission statement is the advancement of people his ancestry - to pass 52-48. G.W. Bush’s first nominee, John Roberts, passed with a high 78-22 due to the opening of a second seat. This switched the controversy from the Rehnquist seat, which Roberts now holds, on the O’Connor seat to which Samuel Alito is expected to be confirmed by no more than 60 votes.

Why is it that Democrat senators have opposed strict-constructionist nominees by Republican presidents while Republican senators have consented to loose-constructionist nominees by Democrat presidents? Is it because the Republicans have more respect for the constitutional process of judicial appointments? The president does have the power to appoint judges. Presidential candidates normally make explicit what judicial philosophy they would look for in their nominees. The Senate’s ‘Advice and Consent’ should be little more than approving or disapproving a Supreme Court nominee’s character, not blocking one’s opponents in the arena of ideas. Or perhaps the Republican senators are just wimps compared to the Democrats. Let’s hope that it is the former: at least the evidence reveals which tent houses the real radical ideologues.

Quotations - Love, Marriage, and Family

"Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

"The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis." – G. K. Chesterton, "David Copperfield," Chesterton on Dickens, 1911

"A good man's work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is." - G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning

"Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline." - G. K. Chesterton, Manalive

"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." - G. K. Chesterton, ILN 1/9/09

"I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess." - G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature

"I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 5-24-30

"The whole structural system of the suburban civilization is based on the case for having bathrooms and the case against having babies." - G.K. Chesterton, G.K.'s Weekly 7-6-29

"Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like." - G.K. Chesterton, Babies and Distributism, GK's Weekly, 11/12/32

"Our materialistic masters could, and probably will, put Birth Control into an immediate practical programme while we are all discussing the dreadful danger of somebody else putting it into a distant Utopia." - G.K. Chesterton, GK's Weekly, 1/17/31

"What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible." - G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, CW II, p.186

Quotations - Economics

"[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them." - G.K. Chesterton, The Debate with Bertrand Russell, BBC Magazine, 11/27/35

"A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 5/25/31

"Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." - G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity, 1921

"Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing." - G.K. Chesterton, Reflections on a Rotten Apple, The Well and the Shallows, 1935

"Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues." - G.K. Chesterton, The Thing

"Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property." - G.K. Chesterton, Commonwealth10-12-32

"The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." - G.K. Chesterton, NY Sun 11-3-18

"I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free." - G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong World

Quotations - Art and Literature

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 5/5/28

"By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece." - G.K. Chesterton, "On Detective Novels," Generally Speaking

"And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads." - G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens

"The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say." - G.K. Chesterton, Daily News.4-22-05

"The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad." - G.K. Chesterton, "Roman Converts" Dublin Review, Jan-Mar. 1925

Quotations - Morality and Truth

"The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists." - G. K. Chesterton, A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls

"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 10/23/09

"It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 3/14/08

"The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 6/11/10

"Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 2/24/06

"Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks." - G.K. Chesterton, Daily News, 2/21/02

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong." - G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion

"There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners." - G.K. Chesterton, The Father Brown Omnibus

"All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 3/14/08

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 9/11/09

"I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 8/4/06

"To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea." - G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, CW I, p128

"Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 9-30-33

"The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea." - G.K. Chesterton, T.P.'s Weekly, Christmas Number, 1910

"All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive." - G.K. Chesterton, The Thing. CW. III 191

"Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities." - G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World

"If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty." - G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

"What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another." -G.K. Chesterton, Daily News 12-21-05

"There are some desires that are not desirable." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy "In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn." - G.K. Chesterton, The Speaker 2-2-01

"Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Church of the Servile State" Utopia of Usurers

"The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice." - G.K. Chesterton, A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - G.K. Chesterton, The Speaker, 12/15/00

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 4/19/30

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 6-3-22

"When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 11-7-08

"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 10-28-22

"Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink." - G.K. Chesterton, "Wine when it is red" All Things Considered

"A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish." - G.K. Chesterton, Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox

"There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 3-11-11

"There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 2-15-08

"Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 4/7/23

"Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition." - G.K. Chesterton, Lunacy and Letters

Quotations - Religion and Faith

"One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created." – G.K. Chesterton, The Boston Sunday Post, 1/16/21

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 7/16/10

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists." - Where All Roads Lead, 1922

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 1/13/06

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - G.K. Chesterton, Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World, 1910

"When people ask me, or indeed anybody else, "Why did you join the Church of Rome?" the first essential answer, if it is partly an elliptical answer, is, "To get rid of my sins." For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people's sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the Church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned." G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - G.K. Chesterton, Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907

"It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary." - G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens

"Theology is only thought applied to religion." - G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem

"The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 1-3-20

"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 8-11-28

"Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake." - G.K. Chesterton, Blake

"Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate." - G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, Ch. 5

"The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why." - G.K. Chesterton, "On Christmas," Generally Speaking

"Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"There are two ways of renouncing the devil," said Father Brown; "and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Secret of Flambeau"

"There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there." - G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

"There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Mercy of Mr. Arnold Bennett" Fancies vs. Fads

“I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.” - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Quotations - Islam

"A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbour's landmark." G.K. Chesterton, ILN Nov. 4, 1911

"I do not know much about Mohammed or Mohammedanism. I do not take the Koran to bed with me every night. But, if I did on some one particular night, there is one sense at least in which I know what I should not find there. I apprehend that I should not find the work abounding in strong encouragements to the worship of idols; that the praises of polytheism would not be loudly sung; that the character of Mohammed would not be subjected to anything resembling hatred and derision; and that the great modern doctrine of the unimportance of religion would not be needlessly emphasised." G.K. Chesterton, ILN Nov. 15, 1913

"A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create; for he is making an outline and a shape. Mohamet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies" The Victorian Age in Literature

"To do Mohammed justice, his main attack was against the idolatries of Asia. Only he thought, just as the Arians did and just as the Unitarians do, that he could attack them better with a greater approximation to plain theism. What distinguishes his heresy from anything like an Arian or Albigensian heresy is that, as it sprang up on the borders of Christendom, it could spread outwards to a barbaric world." - G.K. Chesterton, "A Note on Comparative Religion" Where All Roads Lead

"When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Way of the Desert" The New Jerusalem

"The effort of the Crusades was sufficient to stop the advance of Islam, but not sufficient to exhaust it. A few centuries after, the Moslem attacked once more, with modern weapons and in a more indifferent age; and, amid the disputes of diplomatists and the dying debates of the Reformation, he succeeded in sailing up the Danube and nearly becoming a central European Power like Poland or Austria. From this position, after prodigious efforts, he was slowly and painfully dislodged. But Austria, though rescued, was exhausted and reluctant to pursue, and the Turk was left in possession of the countries he had devoured in his advance." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN Oct. 10, 1914

"Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Age of the Crusades" A Short History of England

"Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox. It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems as to Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it on everybody. It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow. And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule. Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord. As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactly the same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism. The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of charters and chivalric vows, did not grow in that golden desert. The great sun was in the sky and the great Saladin was in his tent, and he must be obeyed unless he were assassinated. Those who complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate Western creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions; and that they are elaborate because they are emancipated." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Fall of Chivalry" The New Jerusalem

"There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of God. There is the same extreme simplification in the solitary figure of the Prophet; and yet this isolation perpetually reacts into its own opposite. A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets. Of these the mightiest in modern times were the man whose name was Ahmed, and whose more famous title was the Mahdi; and his more ferocious successor Abdullahi, who was generally known as the Khalifa. These great fanatics, or great creators of fanaticism, succeeded in making a militarism almost as famous and formidable as that of the Turkish Empire on whose frontiers it hovered, and in spreading a reign of terror such as can seldom be organised except by civilisation…" - G.K. Chesterton, Lord Kitchener

"…but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Romance of Orthodoxy" Orthodoxy