G. K. Chesterton

He sought a mystical means for resisting the depredations of the omnivorous nation-state. Like T. S. Eliot, he thought that the English patriotic and religious spirit provided a transcendent defense against modern political abuses. Eliot became an Anglo-Catholic rather than a Roman Catholic, at least in part, because of this same conviction. Alas, they both were wrong. --Ralph C. Wood, The Virtues and Vices of Chesterton’s Politics, First Principles, July 7, 2009, review of Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G.K. Chesterton, by Julia Stapleton


Despite Chesterton’s ‘medievalism,’ it is not at all obvious what sort of modern political mechanisms would have best embodied his distributist theory, which is arguably the theory’s greatest weakness. What is clear is that distributism was as different from Franco’s brutal politics as it was from Bernard Shaw’s socialism. --Richard John Neuhaus, While We’re At It, First Things, January 2009

Indeed, we might say that the last century belongs to Chesterton—for in that now one-hundred-year-old book, Orthodoxy, he remarkably prophesied the ailments of both modernism and postmodernism, while adeptly commending Christianity as their double cure. --by Ralph C. Wood, Orthodoxy at a Hundred, First Things, November 2008

A Literary Revolution, by Gerald J. Russello, review of The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Ian Ker, Crisis, April 2004

The Essential Chesterton, by David W. Fagerberg, First Things, March 2000

St. Thomas Aquinas by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Spectator, February 27, 1932

List of books by G. K. Chesterton, Wikipedia

Gilbert Magazine (via Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor)

American Chesterton Society and The Blog of the American Chesterton Society

The G K Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture

G. K. Chesterton, by Martin Ward

Chesterton Day by Day: Selections from the Writings in Prose and Verse of G. K. Chesterton, with an Extract for every Day of the Year and for each of the Moveable Feasts, Second Edition, 1912, at Jacques Maritain Center

G.K. Chesterton in Sight & Sound, YouTube


Other works online:

Do We Agree? A Debate between G. K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw, transcribed by Cecil Palmer, 1928 (via Celia Wren at dotCommonweal)