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Remembering a Lively Writer Who Resisted Modernity |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: James E. Person Jr. |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/2007 |
| Size: 1,459 Words, 9,263 Characters |
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G. K. CHESTERTON: THINKING BACKWARD, LOOKING FORWARD
Stephen R. L. Clark
Templeton Foundation Press, $29.95, 248 pages
In his poem "Dover Beach," published in 1867, Matthew Arnold famously described the decline of religious faith during the nineteenth century, likening it to the ocean clutching at the shoreline during ebb tide: "But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."
Although still powerful as a force for cultural stability, faith was in retreat, and with it the customs, conventions and aspects of sustaining continuity that had undergirded the West since the age of the Roman Empire. But as the "conventional" nineteenth century gave way to the "progressive" twentieth, there were some who resisted the decline of wise tradition and long-established ways.
Among those who fought in the forefront of a rear-guard action against modernity was the English man of letters G. K. Chesterto...
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...e backward glance will often not understand the things and the institutions that they find around them, but they would be foolish to dismiss them all without that understanding. Even before a catastrophic fall, we are in a similar position: not understanding whence we came, and why, we may dismiss, unthinkingly, the institutions that we need."
Copyright © 2007 The Washington Times, LLC.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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