Why Catholic? Social & Lecture Series
Topic: "GK Chesterton, Why I am a Catholic"
Speaker: Dale Ahlquist
May 26th, Pauline Books & Media (use back door)
7:00 – 7:15 : Socialize and snacks
7:15 – 8:15 : Lecture
8:15 – 8:30 : Q&A
The following excerpt is taken from GK Chesterton's popular essay, "Why I am a Catholic". This is just a taste of what's in store next Wednesday when famous Chesterton scholar, Dale Ahlquist, speaks to us about Chesterton's brilliant and witty approach to Catholicism. Both GK and Dale are Catholic converts.
"The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only thing that . . ." As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on..."
Read more here.
Dale Ahlquist is President of the American Chesterton Society, host of the EWTN series “G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense,” and Publisher of Gilbert Magazine. He has written two books on Chesterton, edited four more, and has written for over a dozen publications. He has lectured at major colleges and universities and other venues, including Yale, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, Rice, the Vatican Forum in Rome, the Thomas More Centre in Melbourne, and at the House of Lords in London.
He is the co-founder of Chesterton Academy, a new independent high school in the Twin Cities, and the executive producer of Manalive, a film based on a novel by G.K. Chesterton, which will be released in 2010.
Dale received a B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a M.A. from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He lives in Bloomington, Minnesota, with his wife and six children.
“Ahlquist on Chesterton is like Plato on Socrates, or Boswell on Johnson.” New Oxford Review.
G.K. Chesterton, 1874 – 1936
G.K. Chesterton was born on Campden Hill, in Kensington, London on May 29, 1874. He was educated at St. Paul's School and the Slade School of Art. In 1901, he married Frances Blogg. They made their home in Beaconsfield, a borough of Buckinghamshire. They had no children.
Chesterton was one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote thousands of essays for the London newspapers on virtually every subject imaginable. He was the author of over one hundred books and wrote contributions for more than 200 more. His writings cover history, philosophy, literary criticism, political and social theories, and Christian apologetics. In addition, he wrote poetry, plays, novels, biographies and even popular detective fiction. (He was the creator of the well known priest-sleuth, Father Brown.)
In 1916 he took over the editorship of The New Witness, a weekly journal begun by his brother Cecil, who later died in World War I. Chesterton continued the paper, eventually changing the name to G.K.'s Weekly, until his own death. He also helped found, along with his fellow writer and friend, Hilaire Belloc, the Distributist movement. This broad economic program addressed Chesterton's belief that neither capitalism nor socialism were viable forms of economic theory in practice, as each resulted in the concentration of the vast majority of wealth in the hands of a few elites.
Chesterton was noted for his paradoxical style, his endless supply of aphorisms, his great wit, and his great size (he was a large man). Chesterton was as prophetic as he was profound, foreseeing such historical developments as the rise and fall of both Nazism and Communism, and the cultural chaos wrought by modernism. He was also one of the most beloved men of his time, admired affectionately by both his allies and opponents.
