“What we require is the expansion of education, until it includes much older and wiser things.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 6, 1920, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
“My dear friend, the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was once accosted by a lady who complained that the synagogue service did not say what she meant. ‘Madam,’ said Heschel, ‘the idea is not that the service should say what we mean but that we should mean what the service says.’”
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in response to a letter in First Things August-September 2004
In my latest Mercatornet column I say the election of Donald Trump has certainly had a depressing effect on the giant climate gabfest in Baku but far more as symptom than as cause.
“In today’s broken world, especially with its broken education system, which is part of the reason for the broken world, nothing very great is being achieved. In fact, nearly nothing at all is being achieved when students can’t even achieve basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, much less studying great works of literature and philosophy, and learning the art of reason. The lack of achievement is because students are not being taught to focus on a truth that is outside of themselves. They’re being taught to focus on themselves – on their identity, on their rights and their entitlements, and are not taught anything to benefit their unformed and unfilled minds. In the meantime, they have a hunger for truth and goodness and beauty, and it is completely unsatisfied in a system that is designed to starve them of these things. As a result, they are left angry and depressed, but also inarticulate – because they have not been taught to be articulate – so they cannot even express their frustration. And they collapse into their lonely inner world.”
David Warren in Ottawa Citizen Nov. 29, 2006
“Devil-worshipping Polish influencer ‘Satan’s doll’ charged with hacking parents to death with machete”
From Human Events March 4, 2024 and my “Who saw that one coming?” file [https://humanevents.com/2024/03/04/devil-worshipping-polish-influencer-satans-doll-charged-with-hacking-parents-to-death-with-machete]
“When Mr. Chesterton visited Warsaw recently the papers stated that he was accompanied from the station to his quarters by a squadron of glittering Polish cavalry: a pleasing attention, only his due, and one that I am sure he heartily appreciated. But a thoroughly adequate escort for him would include not merely armed horsemen, but cohorts of magicians, clowns, princesses, priests, kings, vegetarians, Puritans, drunkards, landlords, politicians, millionaires, minstrels out of which he has made the fairy-tale world of his poems. The fairy-tales always have a point; it was long ago said that Mr. Chesterton’s value as a moralist was largely based on the fact that he made virtue amusing. Yet even when he is most vigorously jousting against slimy monsters or caitiff knights his spear usually has a few balloons tied on to it, and can be used, when he tires of the more formal tourney, as a quarterstaff or even a slapstick. His jests are mingled with his protestations of anger and love … he has one foot in fairyland and another in Fleet Street …”
The now-forgotten J.C. Squire in 1927, quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
In the Epoch Times this week I praised Tom Holland’s Dominion for arguing compellingly that values we consider universal, such as “human rights”, are actually specifically Judeo-Christian in origin and I warned that they are unlikely to survive the ongoing loss of faith.
“Of course, it would be worth while to pay a big price to get a well-informed people. At the present moment we are paying an abominably big price to get a more and more ill-informed people.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)