Posts Tagged ‘G. K. Chesterton’

            The universally bad reviews of the movie I Frankenstein, which I have not seen, reminded me of the retelling of the Frankenstein story by Dean Koontz.  Although Koontz’s pulp fiction style is not Tolstoy, the series is a thoughtful and devastating critique of modern materialism.  It is also fun to read. Read the rest of this entry »

            Chapter 5 begins a series of seven important chapters that will be central to understand Lewis’s Till We Have Faces.  In this chapter we have a crucial exposition of the ways of the goddess Ungit by her priest, an animated debate between the Priest of Ungit and the Fox, which is a dispute between religious mystery and human rationalism, and finally more evidence of the differences between the Fox and Orual over religion. Read the rest of this entry »

We Christians too quickly dismiss the skeptics.  They actually can give us some help theologically and spiritually.  Jacques Derrida and the philosophical literary movement of deconstructionism is an example. Read the rest of this entry »

My last post was inspired by the following quotation from G. K. Chesterton.  “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”  I reflected on how we criticize sins in others that we aren’t susceptible to but excuse those which we are more inclined to commit.  I also pointed out how strongly Jesus condemned this kind of self-justifying personal hypocrisy. 

This time I’d like to look at the issue of institutional hypocrisy or the way in which political “liberals” and “conservatives” often agree on evils but find different ones excusable.  Read the rest of this entry »

While waiting in the airport for a storm-delayed flight, I picked up Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Lost Souls.  It was a good read of a pulp fiction novel that is a mixture of horror and science fiction with some humor and critique of ideology thrown in.  What really caught my eye, however, was that it is introduced by a quotation from G. K. Chesterton, the subject of my dissertation.  

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” Read the rest of this entry »