These aren't the cats you're looking for

Good day all. Thanks to the ineffable Mr. Johnson for managing to compliment me and essentially force me to join his blog all in one masterstroke. Well played!

I am just recently returned from one of what certainly ranks as the high points of my short (much shorter than other posters) life so far. A G.K Chesterton conference. Please, contain yourself. Mountain Dew through the nose is not becoming. I'm serious. In case you missed it, the large fellow to the left is not me, but in fact is Mr. Chesterton himself. He was a prolific author of the early twentieth century; though his material sounds eerily like it was written for us a hundred years later.

This the conference focused on one of Chesterton's masterpieces, Orthodoxy. It will be 100 years old this September. He wrote it as a challenge. He had written a book called "Heretics" outlining many of the incorrect streams of thought that were popular then (and today), and systematically crushed them. Upon reading this book, many critics challenged Chesterton not just to attack others theories, but to submit his own. He gladly accepted the challenge, his theory was Christian Orthodoxy. In it he outlines his own "spiritual journey", he creates a system for himself and discovers it is a pale imitation of the 1900 year old Church.

His style, humour, wit are magnificent additions to his profound and deep message about humanity, about civilization, about Christianity. A great primer on Chesterton is "Common Sense 101" by Dale Alquist, president of the American Chesterton Society. It is available here.
At the conference, we were treated to a chapter by chapter ride through Orthodoxy by speakers from around the world. Here is a sample section from the book.

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.

The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.