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Zusatztext "Whenever I feel my faith going dry again! I wander to a shelf and pick up a book by G.K. Chesterton." -- Philip Yancey! author of What's So Amazing About Grace? and The Jesus I Never Knew "My favorite on the list [of top 100 spiritual classics of the twentieth century] is Chesterton's Orthodoxy. It offers wonderful arguments for embracing religious traditions! but it also has humor you don't typically find in religious writing." --Philip Zaleski! author and journalist Named by Publisher's Weekly as one of 10 "indispensable spiritual classics" of the past 1500 years. --Publisher?s Weekly "Chesterton's most enduring book.... Charming." --World Informationen zum Autor Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English journalist, poet, biographer, historian, debater, radio personality, and novelist. One of the literary giants of the twentieth century, Chesterton constantly participated in public life, debating George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, and maintaining on-going witty arguments with leading journalists and critics of his time. He is the author of more than 100 books on a wide variety of subjects; he is best known for his much-loved Father Brown series of detective stories and this apologetic classic. Klappentext Chesterton's timeless exploration of the essentials of Christian faith and of his pilgrimage to belief (more than 750,000 copies sold in the Image edition) is now reissued. For G.K. Chesterton, orthodoxy carries us into the land of romance, right action, and revolution. In Orthodoxy , a classic in religious autobiography, he tells of his pilgrimage there by way of the doctrines of Christianity set out in the Apostles' Creed. Where science seeks to explain all things in terms of calculation and necessary law, Chesterton argues on behalf of the Christian doctrines of mystery and free will. Sanity, he says, belongs to the poet who accepts the romance and drama of these beliefs rather than to the logician who does not. This sanity is not static. It does not mean merely learning the right doctrines and then lapsing into a refined meditation on them. Chesterton dismisses such an inactive belief as "the greatest disaster of the nineteenth century." For him, right thinking is a waste without right action. For Chesterton the populist, political ction often spells revolution. He discovers in the doctrines of original sin and the divinity of Christ ever-present seedbeds of revolt in the face of the tyrannies of money and power. Chapter II THE MANIAC Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Supermen. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself...
