“and if there be some harder, better way to salvation than to follow that which we believe to be good, then we are all damned.”
Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley
“If truth is relative, to what is it relative?”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News June 2, 1906, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“The history of mankind is the history of ideas.”
Ludwig von Mises Planned Chaos [1st sentence of “The Liberation of the Demons”]
“The whole conscious and subconscious trend of modernism is the distrust, and even the detestation, of the ordinary man.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness March 9, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Charlemagne receives a buffet that goes near to bring him down: the voice of St Gabriel, rallying him, has that tart stringency which distinguishes the Divine word from pious vapourings: ‘And what’, said he, ‘art thou about, great King?’”
Dorothy L. Sayers’ introduction to The Song of Roland
“The Modern Mind is so called to distinguish it from the Mind.”
G.K. Chesterton in America March 15, 1930, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“I hope that Christianity will participate in that [“ecumenical encounter of the world faiths”] dialogue in a way that is respectful but not too apologetic or appeasing. Integrity requires us to speak for the truth as we see it, and we need to remember Farrer’s warning that ‘the acknowledgement of a vital truth is always divisive until it becomes universal’. I sometimes fear that Christianity is a little too eager for dialogue, a little lacking in nerve to hold fast to what it has learned of God in Christ. We Europeans must shake off lingering guilt arising from our colonial past. We certainly do not want to be triumphalist, but nor do we wish to forget that there may well be issues on which we are right and those who do not share our view are mistaken. In the end, it is the question of truth that matters, and there is an inevitable exclusivity about truth. If you tell me that you hold the view that the phenomenon of heat is due to the subtle fluid caloric, I do not say that you are entitled to your opinion and I respect you for it. I try, instead, to convince you of the correctness of the kinetic theory of heat energy. Either Jesus is God’s Lord and Christ or he is not, and it matters supremely to know which is the right judgement. Of course, we must be careful to distinguish between the necessary intolerance that truth has of error and a social intolerance exhibited by failing to respect as people those whose opinions we believe to be mistaken. I do not despise you for your caloric belief, nor do I try to impose my kinetic belief on you by harassment or manipulation…. A religion which has resisted its own dissolving into a gnostic account of timeless truth should be open to meeting the historic idiosyncracies present in all religious traditions, without reducing them to merely contingent collections of opinion.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
In a talk to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta "Freedom Talk" in Red Deer, AB on July 7 I argue that a radical commitment to truth-telling, including refusing to remain silent in the face of lies, is crucial to personal and to political freedom.