Renascence

'With Considerable Art' Chesterton On Blake, Browning, and Shaw

In his account of the "very flattering" invitation he received from John Morley to write the Browning volume for the English Men of Letters series (an invitation that placed him in the company of such established critics and authors as Sir Edmund Gosse, Sir Leslie Stephen, Henry James, and Anthony Trollope), Chesterton utters this disclaimer: I will not say that I wrote a book on Browning; but I wrote a book about love, liberty, poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), a...

Dumb Ox at the Crossroads of English Catholicism: G. K. Chesterton's 'Thoughts Not in Themselves New'

At the center of Orthodoxy, his personal conversion narrative published in 1908 in the midst of the English reception of Pius X's 1907 Syllabus and encyclical letter Pascendi, Chesterton vividly expressed the connection between natural theology and natural law, between metaphysics and social doctrine: "The truth is that the western energy that dethrones tyrants has been directly due to the western theology that says "? am I, thou art thou' ... Ward wrote that Chesterton quite simply retraced...

Flannery O'connor As Baroque Artist: Theological and Literary Strategies

Brad Gooch, in his recently published biography of the writer, offers many instances of this in O'Connor's own correspondence, but the most striking is a second-hand reference in a letter written by the musicologist Edward Maisel to Yadoo director Mrs. Ames, encouraging her to invite O'Connor back for the winter term at the artists' retreat: "I have been on several evening walks with her, and find her immensely serious, with a sharp sense of humor; a very devout Catholic (thirteenth century, ...

Cosmos Revisited: Belief and the 'Future' of Walker Percy

The former age was ending and a new one beginning, marked by a general liberalization in the social, political, and religious fabrics of the culture. [...] began what Elie calls "the present age ... an age that is now coming to an end" (14).