Orthodoxy

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Jun 2013 · Moody Publishers

About this ebook

Now with a foreword by Matthew Lee Anderson

Antiquated. Unimaginative. Repressive. We've all heard these common reactions to orthodox Christian beliefs. Even Christians themselves are guilty of the tendency to discard historic Christianity.

Yet as we read through the literature in Christianity’s past, we learn that we are in better company with our beliefs than we might think. Through his enchanting book, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton reminds us of the paradoxes of our faith and the joy that comes when we explore them.

From the foreword by Matthew Lee Anderson, author of The End of Our Exploring:

“How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?”

And with that question, G.K. Chesterton recounts the heart of an intellectual journey that took him from the edges of a nihilistic pessimism into the center of the paradoxical joy of Christian orthodoxy. His book is not a defense of the Christian faith, at least not primarily, so much as an attempt to explain how the startling paradoxes and sharp edges of the creed explain everything else.

It is a dated work, dealing in the categories and concerns of Chesterton’s contemporaries, and yet it comes nearer timelessness than anything we have today. Though Orthodoxy was written near the start of the 20th century, I have dubbed it the most important book for the 21st. There are few claims I have made in my life that I am more sure of than that one. 

Ratings and reviews

Ipso Facto today the world needs to be challenged because the mind needs good truth rather than big lie of AI which man never be able to put a soul in a machine. C K surely will have exposed the lies of disinformation in a world that truth is being told by con tech midgets not giants. Cgesterson definitely is still speaking the truth from his writtings.we need authors as good as C.K. still is revenant ahead of this secular tech ignorance published today.A man ahead of the lost worldly times going back do midevil ages. Count a critical savant.

I found Chesterton's references a little vague a few times because he sometimes refers to well-known people of his day who have faded into obscurity. He also has a "roundabout" way of writing that I found very challenging to follow sometimes. In fact, I had to read some passages several times to understand his argument, and 1 or 2 never were clear to me. But there is a lot of value in his discussion that presages C. S. Lewis' writings. Recommended.

Chesterton rushes headlong through his journey to faith and the reader is swept along in his wake! His exuberance and wonder are catching and he demands that the reader consider their first principles as he dashes through his questioning of his own. In the end, he leaves you before a very human and simultaneously very divine Christ.

About the author

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON (1874-1936) is the author of 100 books, including Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, which led young atheist C.S. Lewis to become a Christian. He is probably best known for his series about the priest-detective Father Brown and was also known as a poet and a playwright. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he primarily considered himself a journalist, writing over 4,000 newspaper essays for papers such as Illustrated London News and Daily News, as well as his own G. K.¿s Weekly.