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   Book Info

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Orthodoxy  
Author: G. K. Chesterton
ISBN: 0898705525
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review



If G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith is, as he called it, a "slovenly autobiography," then we need more slobs in the world. This quirky, slender book describes how Chesterton came to view orthodox Catholic Christianity as the way to satisfy his personal emotional needs, in a way that would also allow him to live happily in society. Chesterton argues that people in western society need a life of "practical romance, the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." Drawing on such figures as Fra Angelico, George Bernard Shaw, and St. Paul to make his points, Chesterton argues that submission to ecclesiastical authority is the way to achieve a good and balanced life. The whole book is written in a style that is as majestic and down-to-earth as C.S. Lewis at his best. The final chapter, called "Authority and the Adventurer," is especially persuasive. It's hard to imagine a reader who will not close the book believing, at least for the moment, that the Church will make you free. --Michael Joseph Gross


Review
"Whenever I feel my faith going dry again, I wander to a shelf and pick up a book by G.K. Chesterton."
--from the foreword by Philip Yancey, author of What's So Amazing About Grace? and The Jesus I Never Knew

"My favorite on the list [of top 100 spiritual classics of the twentieth century] is Chesterton's Orthodoxy. It offers wonderful arguments for embracing religious traditions, but it also has humor you don't typically find in religious writing."
--Philip Zaleski, author and journalist

Named by Publisher's Weekly as one of 10 "indispensable spiritual classics" of the past 1500 years.
"Chesterton's most enduring book.... Charming."





Orthodoxy

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Orthodoxy, as author G. K. Chesterton employs the term here, means "right opinion." In this, the masterpiece of his brilliant literary career, Chesterton applies the concept of correct reasoning to his acceptance of Christian faith. As he expresses it in his preface, "It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they are all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if it is not that, it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence."

Written in a down-to-earth and familiar style, Orthodoxy nevertheless presents formal and scholarly arguments in the explanation and defense of the tenets underlying Christianity. Paradox and contradiction, Chesterton maintains, do not constitute barriers to belief; imagination and intuition are as relevant to the processes of thought and understanding as logic and rationality. "When ever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology," he observes, "we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth." Chesterton defines his insights with thought-provoking analogies, personal anecdotes, and engaging humor, making his century-old book a work of enduring charm and persuasion.

     



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