Simon Conway Morris on Chesterton

Who the heck is Simon Conway Morris, I hear you ask? Well, he's a biologist, and a highly respected one. But don't hold that against him, because he's also a Christian and a fan of Chesterton. In fact, he opened his 2005 Boyle Lecture (the Boyle lectures deal with the subject of science and religion) with a Chestertonian quotation:

It was G.K. Chesterton who trenchantly reminded us that, if one was going to preach, then it was more sensible to expend one’s energies on addressing the converted rather than the unconverted. It was the former, after all, that were – and even more so are – in constant danger of missing the point and sliding away from the Faith into some vague sort of syncretistic, gnostic, gobbledegook. Chesterton, as ever, was right and should you think this is just another of his tiresome paradoxes may I urge you to re-read him: his prescience concerning our present situation and, worse, where we are heading is astounding. Yet, it might seem a little odd in a lecture devoted to the ancient and ongoing debate between science and religion to invoke at its onset the name of Chesterton. Well, no, I don’t think so. First, as Stanley Jaki has reminded us, it is over-simplistic to regard Chesterton as anti-science2. What Chesterton regarded with the deepest alarm was not science, but its mis-use.

Not only that, but his potted biography for the occasion concludes with the words: "If undisturbed, he can usually be found reading G.K. Chesterton, with a glass of wine nearby." Sounds like my kind of bloke.

Sixth Meeting of the GK Chesterton Society of Ireland

The sixth meeting of the GK Chesterton Society of Ireland will take place on the sixteenth of March at twelve o'clock, in our usual location of the Central Catholic Library, 74 Merrion Square, Dublin.

Hope to see you there.

Hear Chesterton Talk!

This wonderful Youtube video contains clips from four speeeches, including a lengthy recording of a speech he made in Canada at a luncheon honouring Rudyard Kipling. One interesting aspect of this speech is that you can hear Chesterton laughing at his own jokes.

It seems to me that everybody in the 1930's spoke in exactly the same voice, but doubtless that's the same phenomenon as Westerners thinking that all Chinese people look the same.