Well-Chosen Baker’s Dozen
Gilbert Keith Chesterton is an international treasure, and, although the man and his rich body of work were inexplicably neglected for awhile, we have Dale Ahlquist to thank for reintroducing Chesterton to a generation starved for truth and common sense.
In his television series for EWTN (available as well from Ignatius Press), Ahlquist, president and founder of the American Chesterton Society and editor of Gilbert!magazine, presented a dramatic introduction to the life and works of this major Catholic author. The series and now the book are successful in whetting the appetite.
The feast is sumptuous. The amazingly prolific Chesterton—a champion of the common man, the family, and the Catholic faith (even before he entered the Church in 1922 at age 48)—wrote profoundly and with delicious wit on religion, politics, philosophy, history, economics, literature, art, and sociology. Not only is his writing absorbing, even life-changing, it is also delightful reading.
Ahlquist introduces readers to a well-chosen Chesterton baker’s dozen: twelve non-fiction books and the popular “Father Brown” detective stories. In addition to the Father Brown series, the books discussed include Orthodoxy, Heretics, What’s Wrong with the World, The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, The Well and the Shadows, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, The Everlasting Man (influential to the conversion of C. S. Lewis), The Outline of Sanity, The Superstition of Divorce, and Eugenics and Other Evils.
Beginning each section with a pithy quotation from the book, Ahlquist wisely lets the author’s words speak for themselves with a minimum of introductory and explanatory comment. It is a courageous act for any writer to sandwich his own words between Chestertonian excerpts, and to him we owe the thanks that, as Chesterton said, “are the highest form of thought.”
Why is a dead, white, male English author, gone these 68 years, so important for twenty-first-century American readers? Because his nearly hundred-year-old observations and reflections on modernity are stunning in their relevance to our troubled culture. For example, in 1935, when Americans might have thought Roe v. Wade impossible, Chesterton wrote in The Well and the Shallows, “One of the features of the state of peace we now enjoy is the killing of a considerable number of harmless human beings.” And, as if he could envision the horrifying effects of MTV, the Walkman, and Hollywood on America, he wrote in the same book, “The nerve is being killed; and it is being killed by being overstimulated and therefore stunted and stunned.”
Does the problem of big government and big business squeezing out the ordinary citizen sound like something from today’s newspaper? Chesterton struggled with the economic choices of socialism and capitalism, and his solution, gleaned from Rerum Novarum and called distributism, is astonishing in its wisdom. Ahlquist summarizes this economic philosophy from Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity: “It offers freedom (which is responsibility) and security (which is protection of the individual and the community). It is based on the widespread ownership of private property. It presumes that small business is better than big business, that craftsmanship is superior to mass production, and that local government is better than big government.”
These are but two examples from many. Chesterton’s insights on marriage and divorce, family life, materialism, ideals, and faith cut through the chaos of today’s philosophies to the essence of truth. His clear thought can cast light on fuzziness in our own thinking, and his good humor and enormous humility (he considered himself simply a journalist whose scribblings would be discarded) can inspire.
One caveat: When you read The Apostle of Common Sense, you will long to read at one sitting every Chesterton book ext ant, even those not discussed. So where should an eager reader begin? Ahlquist: “People often ask me what is the best introduction to Chesterton. . . . One of the answers is the Father Brown stories. They are full of Chesterton’s wit and wisdom, and they are good yarns. Besides that, they are detective stories. Detective stories are about finding the truth. And Chesterton understands that our search for truth is what defines us.”
Indeed he does, for he writes in The Thing, “All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead but the darker secret of why he is alive.” For Catholics and those not yet Catholic, Chesterton can be a valuable ally in discovering that secret.
— Ann Applegarth
G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense
By Dale Ahlquist
Ignatius Press
200 pages
$13.95
ISBN: 0-898-708-575
Eternal Vacation
A cursory glance at first-time author Anthony DeStefano’s A Travel Guide to Heaven will tell the reader that he has tackled a somewhat serious topic—life in heaven—in a lighthearted manner. To be sure, DeStefano’s jovial tone is not meant to trivialize what awaits the faithful but to enhance through joyful speculation the answer to a question every believer has, at one point, asked: What is heaven like?
“You see, if heaven is anything at all, it’s fun!” expounds DeStefano in the book’s prologue, “Flight Plan.” Here, heaven is likened to a Disney-fied, all-inclusive resort, and DeStefano (a former student of Pulitzer Prize winner Frank McCourt) is the reader’s self-appointed travel agent, offering chapters such as “Welcome to Paradise!” and “The Vacation That Never Ends.”
Yet for the scriptural references mentioned (a listing, not necessarily exhaustive, appears in an appendix at the end with a select bibliography ranging from the inspirational like Billy Graham to heavy hitters like the Summa Theologiae), DeStefano’s writing tone makes it clear that Travel Guide is not scholarly work. Though espousing a Catholic heritage, DeStefano’s Travel Guide is not an exclusively Catholic work, either, but offers readers a nondenominational, non-offensive speculation about heaven.
Seen through DeStefano’s eyes, heaven is not the mass of billowy clouds crowned with sunlight as modern media and editorial cartoons would have us believe but a tangible place. To steal a line from a popular tune by the seventies rock band America, there are “plants and birds and rocks and things” and pretty much anything one could desire. A NASCAR fan achieving heaven more than likely will spend eternity with tower tickets to the Daytona 500, while the nature lover will find heaven to be one continuous trail hike.
DeStefano’s argument for heaven as a physical, tangible place lies in his belief that the earth will undergo a resurrection at the end time, becoming reborn as our heaven. This idea is not far from the Catechism’s: “We know neither the moment of the consummation of the earth and of man, nor the way in which the universe will be transformed. The form of this world, distorted by sin, is passing away, and we are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, in which happiness will fill and surpass all the desires of peace arising in the hearts of men” (CCC 1048).
To this effect, DeStefano has a failsafe section especially for the doubting passerby who idly thumbs through the book at Barnes & Noble and wonders aloud, “Oh, yeah? What about the dinosaurs?” (It is DeStefano’s theory that the dinosaurs were created and made extinct in order to give future generations something to ponder, research, and discuss—and presumably to offer something constructive for Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg to do.)
DeStefano tackles other questions (Do pets—or even dinosaurs, for that matter—go to heaven? Will married people remain married in heaven?) with similar whimsical aplomb. Celebrities, assuming their names are included in the Book of Life, also will be seen in DeStefano’s vision of the afterlife, though their celebrity status might not carry with them. In heaven, everybody is a celebrity entitled to the same luxurious benefits.
Travel Guide is a short book, measuring in at only 193 pages, and can be read by a quick reader in a few hours. DeStefano’s friendly, by-gosh writing style enhances the uplifting nature of this book—a reader more than likely will come away from Travel Guide tasting its heavenly sweetness. But readers looking for substance in spiritual matters might find more satisfaction in the writings of the saints, which, while not always as easy to digest as books like Travel Guide, are of outstanding nutritional value for the soul.
— Kathryn Lively
A Travel Guide to Heaven
By Anthony DeStefano
Doubleday
193 pages
$19.95
ISBN: 0-385-509-88X
Don’t Know Much About Biology
The marriage debate shouts at us from newsstands and is gnawed over nightly by television commentators. The legal battle over same-sex “marriage” casts an unwelcome shadow over the coming presidential election. Closer to home, Americans grapple with religious and social responses to homosexuality in their families, parishes, and workplaces. A cogent Christian examination of the issues, written for the layman, is overdue.
Marvin Ellison, a professor of Christian ethics at Bangor Theological Seminary, has just published his most recent entry in the debate, Same Sex Marriage? A Christian Ethical Analysis. The volume is well-organized with helpful periodic summations of the arguments presented. Though Ellison addresses readers in terms accessible to the non-specialist, his assessment is objectively neither Christian nor ethical. The book jacket blurb provides the prospective reader with a map of the analysis to come: “Written by a gay man and a progressive Christian ethicist who places justice making at the heart of contemporary spirituality.”
The politicized phrase “justice making” marginalizes God’s laws. It muscles aside two millennia of Christian teaching, tradition, and human wisdom in favor of the “lived experience” of articulate and organized members of the gay community. A committed Christian will find few shared references in the “peculiar debate” set out in Ellison’s “Christian” analysis of this “hotly contested” issue. An ethical appraisal of the same-sex union debate would require a fair examination of the biological realities of homosexual practice, including the devastating psychological wounds as well as consequent diseases. Both are absent.
Nonetheless, there are two compelling reasons for those with an apologetic interest (and a tough constitution) to read the book. First, what is gained by suffering through this slim volume is a sober look at an insider’s playbook for the attack on marriage. Along the way the reader is bludgeoned with hellish constructs such as “erotic justice,” “sexual fundamentalism,” “ethical eroticism,” and sneers at traditional marriage, a despised “gendered structure.” Sadly, Catholic dissidents contributed to the “justice” framework for the deconstruction of marriage. Among them is Dan Maguire of Marquette University, who redefines sin for the ignorant masses of good Christians: “The programmatic exclusion of gay persons from the multiple benefits of erotic attraction which often opens the way to such a union is harmful, cruel, and therefore sinful.”
Homosexual advocates plead their cause as a case for the basic justice and social benefits due to any group of citizens previously denied civil rights. But more pervasive throughout the work is the Marxist liberation theology rhetoric that pitches the oppressed (homosexuals and the environment) against the oppressors (patriarchal Christianity and patriarchal Western civilization). This, of course, is a failure of correct categorization inasmuch as it seeks to locate a deviant behavior pattern in the context of legitimate rights.
In seven chapters readers are guided through a review of changes in the construction of marriage, an argument for justice (uniquely defined), the arguments by the homosexual lobby in favor of legal recognition of same-sex unions, the gay community’s arguments against seeking legal sanction for their liaisons so that “queerness” may remain a resistance movement in the wider culture against “contested Christian teaching.” The primary charge against historical marriage—leveled by both those who favor recognition of same-sex unions and those opposed to it within the gay community—is that marriage has been an unjust structure anchored in patriarchy, a legalizing of domination, and a failure to share power. Notable is the goal both camps set: “decentering marriage from its culturally hegemonic position. ” Lest a reader fail to g.asp the comprehensive scope of the plan for “marriage” re-imaged by the homosexual academy, Ellison states it bluntly: “I am persuaded that justice-love should replace procreative heterosexual marriage as the guiding norm for intimacy.”
The fondness of the gay community for “transgendered” persons speaks to the notion of the injustice of any and all gender roles or constructs. Such roles are not biological, argue gay-positive proponents, but cultural and social. This line of argumentation highlights the most glaring failure of the book: There is scant discussion of the biological realities of creation. Biology simply is ignored, save the observations that advanced technologies make various methods of conception possible and that “family” need not be predicated on biological kinship but should be “intentional”—that is, chosen by preference, not nature.
The natural reality that we term “marriage” is written into the created order. The complementarity of the sexes is part of the givenness of God’s design for the world. Christians acknowledge marriage as pre-societal: Marriage existed before there were social structures to regulate it. As a given, the basic format for marriage has been part of every culture at every period of human history. Additionally, history records no culture that enshrined same-sex liaisons and survived.
Which brings up the second reason defenders of marriage can learn valuable lessons from the arguments offered herein. Ellison argues the following: A general tolerance of non-marital sex, out-of-wedlock births, and the failure of modern Christian marriages that are lived out in violation of the Christian teachings—which in turn lead to broken and re-combined families—is a justification for devising new forms of marriage based on a mutuality of pleasure. He writes, “Of particular significance is the decoupling of sex from procreation. Contracepted rather than procreative sex has become the normative for most heterosexual couples. . . . When heterosexual sex is no longer driven by the procreative imperative both men and women are more likely to focus on sexual pleasure. . . . It can be argued that the majority of the heterosexual culture is coming to resemble gay culture with its . . . experimentation with diverse family forms and its ‘indulgences’ with respect to the pleasures of non-procreative sex.” Ellison notes that heterosexuals have rejected their own traditional structures of sexuality in favor of “reorganizing” along gay and lesbian patterns. “This process,” he writes, “may be thought of as reverse assimilation.”
Apologists for traditional marriage will find a direct link between the abandonment of Christian sexual morality and the rise of the homosexual agenda. A look over the cultural divide may help Christians recommit to truly Christian marriages.
— Mary Jo Anderson
Same-Sex Marriage? A Christian Ethical Analysis
By Marvin M. Ellison
Pilgrim Press
198 pages
$24.00
ISBN: 0-829-815-600