EWTN Live: Dale Ahlquist - G.K. Chesterton

Friedrich Nietzsche said God is dead - which G K Chesterton responded if there were no God there would be no atheists tonight on EWTN live we'll look at Chesterton's work and see how it continues to be important today so please stay with us thank you and welcome I'm father Mitch Pacwa welcome to EWTN live our chance to bring you guests from all over the world tonight's guest just goes to Minnesota that's pretty good place it's a good place they're warming up all the time now he of course has been presenting the work at GK Chesterton to new audiences and using his philosophy to fight the 21st century enemies of Christianity which are not much different than the ones G K Chesterton battle about a hundred years ago so please welcome the president of the American Chesterton society mr. Dale Alquist wonderful to be here how you doing I'm doing very well thank you Reverend pas quoi good now speaking of Reverend Father you're about to become a father in large yes I am yeah and it has something to do with you yes yes explain yourself Lucy I will my daughter who has been in some of our television shows on G K Chesterton some of the dramatic and yets she and her future husband started dating while we were down here filming the shows for our previous season and then they came down here and did another series that that that he helped create called the young Catholic minute which is about to premiere on EWTN je and he proposed to her under the tree in your front yard yes I came out to hey what are you kids doing out here but then you did something a lot of newly engaged couples don't get to have done to them you invited them into your private chapel and set an engagement blessing over them yeah that's one of the things that's really neat the church has an official blessing for the engagement of couples and I really like doing that and as in the Eastern Rite setting becomes a big celebration you know the third part of the liturgical celebration before the marriage comes so it's a great thing but it's a nice couple they are there they're good-looking and they're actually kind of intelligent both of them too if you do say so yourself well speaking of intelligence yeah tell us yeah speaking of that you are back you're working on a series Matt effect you've been here a couple weeks already yes working on new series what is this new series on Chesterton going to be about it's our sixth season that we're doing and we have the same wonderful variety of shows on Chesterton we do an episode on life and death one on comedy and tragedy we have Chesterton's approach to social justice and to the environment which not surprisingly is mirrors the same approach as the Catholic Church what do you mean the approach to the environment he gesture t'en actually wrote about the the environment and how the modern world has really the wrong attitude towards nature in what way well he he nails it on the head when he says nature is not our mother nature is our sister because we both have the same father there you go and you know it there's this deification of nature that's even gets close to being promoted by the public school system on earth day absolutely you know where some things that they do and make I like to encourage our parents to keep an eye on what happens on Earth Day I'm in favor of planting trees cleaning up the garbage keeping the water clean keeping the air clean everybody everybody should be in favor there well it's just like you know his that quotation if his really gets it right because if nature is our sister well naturally you respect your sister you take care of your sister you watch out for your sister but your sister has no authority over you right and that's that's the difference see and with with Mother Earth's yeah and as again even the deification of earth they used an old Greek word for mother earth Gaia yeah and they try to say oh we're good sell big guy in or I don't know if you've heard some scoops they'll say well old guy is mad at us that's why they're more earthquakes no there are more earthquakes the same number every years it's just sometimes now we're hitting cities all right the same numbers but again it's not our mother and and so Chesterton always provides that refreshing perspective we also have an episode on we have a couple different ones this year we have we have one on the school that we just started Chesterton Academy you did an episode on in this school what what level of school isn't it's a high school it's up in Minnesota and weird we've talked about all the problems with education over the years and Chesterton is a great critic of modern education well what we're especially these days absolutely the decline the lack the growing lack of smart yeah and the problem with compulsory state-sponsored education is that we don't have any control over what is taught yeah and that's that's the big problem in Chesterton says we we use the word education as if it's a magic word but we never talk about what is actually being taught and so what what we try to do is actually solve the problem by creating a a model of what a high school should look like and it's we reflect Chesterton's own thinking as a complete thinker one of the problems with modern education is that everything is compartmentalized everything's broke do you mean by compartmental we have each subject is taught so distinctly from the other subjects that no one sees how they are connected together anymore and so because of that we we are fragmented in our thinking it was that going on in cheston's time 100 years ago yes it was yeah in fact he was an early critic of compulsory education state-sponsored education because it was of that that very nature of how regimented and broken up it wasn't of course all of it is broken up from the central truth it's all divorced from the central truth which is the incarnation every truth comes back to that one so everything that we we teach should come back to that central truth so we have a very integrated curriculum that we've created for our school and we're gonna show how that works and on one of our programs oh good because you know it's not just the fragmentation of education where you know I have my degree in theology but by the time you get to the PhD level the Old Testament people in the Graduate School of Religion don't talk much there's not much interchange with the folks in systematic theology or moral and we'd all be theologians but well that no that's that's the system at will not church history no we don't do that we just do this here and then you get more specified with well I'm just doing with prophetic literature you get more specialized as well and they're doing that earlier and earlier now with specialization these days just see the child has a tendency towards one direction so they just push him in that direction and he gets cheated out of three quarters of his education because they don't give him a general overall view of things and so we lay a philosophical Brown ground on which we builds everything from so we get good literature good philosophy good theology but also the math and the sciences and then the arts so these kids learn their faith but they also learn how to express their faith and defend their faith so speech is required acting is required drawing is required singing is required now one of the other things that I'd wonder about seeing it's named after Chesterton so they teach them how to tell jokes well we do we we actually have a lot of laughter at our school and and that is a very important aspect of Education it's supposed to be fun as well as work yeah this is also the hundredth anniversary of one of Chesterton's books which is you know what's wrong with the world no you work much with that book well yeah that's a that's a very Fedak book and we're actually gonna be concentrating on that book at our conference our summer conference coming up in August it's gonna be at Mount st. Mary's University in Emmitsburg Maryland oh nice first weekend in August yes steamy well you know what's one of them that's wrong with the world it's hot in Maryland in August but that book is so prophetic and we are gonna be talking about all the all the things that Chesterton prophesied about what's wrong with the world he hits four main things in that book which were big government big business public education and feminism really he was he was dealing with feminism back then oh yeah yeah and big government and big government imagine yeah I don't think he had a clue as to how big government could get well I think he saw it coming though father I really do he saw that if this tendency continues it's it's gonna get completely worse and it'll get out of hand Chesterton also says you know if you eliminate the god the government becomes the god and that's what's that's what's happened to speak it's gotten so big that that's there's no higher authority that you can ever appeal to than the government because they've eliminated the God you know we see that as not affect the very active elimination of God from the schools you know certainly I don't think it began but it certainly was a turning point when with the illumina lumination of school prayer and the government-run schools and you know every time I read about that I was just looking at a book this past weekend on that topic and you see how instead of saying the Our Father and reading a little of the Bible we have metal detectors at our schools to get in the building I think there may be a connection between those two phenomenon I think and and as well there's a lot of crime in our schools that did not exist at all so you know there's a real decline in in government-run schools they're not allowed to teach the truth and and so people start their lives reflect on education where they haven't gotten the truth and of course the they also reflect all the modern philosophies which which brings us to one of the other shows that we're doing really we hit the modern philosopher himself Nietzsche we have a show devoted to what first why would you called Frederick Nietzsche the the modern philosopher what what makes him so you know important for the modern times Chesterton shows how modern philosophy has a has a distinct lineage that goes back to the Protestant Reformation all of these bad philosophies came out of Germany and each one of them was farther and farther divorced from from the central truth of the church so it starts with with Conte and then it goes to Hegel and Schopenhauer and and and finally you get to DJ it and each one of them is just a little more crazy than the previous one and Nietzsche represents the pinnacle of it because it is so completely insane yet he has a great quote from food that Nietzsche liked to read it says god is dead God remains dead and we have killed him how shall we the murderers of all murderers comfort ourselves and he answered must not we ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it now that is a quote that certainly fits today but where people again we wanna make mother earth a goddess and themselves one because the New Age movement was about that but not only the New Age movement what else what what Chesterton shows and and we bring that out in our in the episode that we just created for the new season is Nietzsche's philosophy really affected the German people in the 20th century how so they started embracing his ideas of the over man the Superman intervention yeah that we should that we have evolved to something higher than human and and of course he thought they saw it being with their race that they were the master race and any anybody else really should be eliminated they're weak they don't deserve to even exist and they should be eliminated and that kind of thinking you know was an infection that was planted by Nietzsche and it was there was seeds of it all right away with Prussian ism but it continued on through Nazism what do you mean by Prussian is Impressionism was what Prussia was was the German Empire at the time of World War one and and Chesterton's it was basically the the back back in 1800s the Chancellor of Prussia that the prime minister of Prussia was Bismarck Otto von Bismarck he unified the rest of Germany around the Prussian state so that became what we now called Germany right but Chester had always made a distinction between Germany which was a nation of German people and Prussia which was this artificial Empire created by Bismarck which had a philosophy of you know we have it right and we're gonna conquer anybody who disagrees with us and such as the French in 1870 yeah and so the and they started expanding their empire and when they moved into Belgium when they they took over a Belgium right at the beginning of World War one which one of the that helped precipitate that war Chester says we know we have to stop this because if this philosophy takes over it'll be the end of Christendom and that's why he was you know very much a supporter of England's and other people's involvement in in world war wanted to fight the Prussian Empire when when they defeated Germany in World War one he said this this philosophy still exists in Germany and we we really haven't conquered it yet and it's going to come back it's going to return he says the world is moving towards a new war it'll be the worst war in all of history and it will start on the Polish border and so he prophesied at the beginning of a World War two because it says it's really was it bigger that's exactly where it did be when the Nazis invaded Poland under first 1939 right and he saw that Hitler represented Nietzsche's philosophy so and and and when then these of course Chesterton died before World War two started but but his prophecies came true the war started Nazism did reflect that really the evil heinous ideas of Nietzsche of eliminating the weak and and making anyone weak suffer and in and it's not only Nietzsche it's also the the role of the Charles Darwin oh yes and in Darwin's second book the ascent of man right he talks about some people's are inferior he talked Darwin was very much a racist and some ways he didn't want to eliminate anybody he was a nice man but his ideas were that well these people are inferior and you have to breathe them out the way you breed cattle that was the exact term especially black people from Africa and these ideas were brought to Germany by one of his disciples and combined with Nietzsche right right and Chesterton also wrote about that he wrote about eugenics and and so it means what good genes the good the good genetics to pass on and only the only those with the good genes should be reproducing anybody with bad genes shouldn't reproduce it and and that was actually the the earliest argument for for birth control was not not for sexual license but only that only certain people should be having babies because they're the ones who should reproduce and these inferior races over here they should they should actually be sterilized or they should at least practice birth control so they don't have babies because they are inferior and once again you know someone Margaret Sanger the founders of Planned Parenthood worked hard to convince at black preachers to get the folks to use birth control so they would not her idea was they wouldn't know reproduce right and that's that and she her ideas were directly from the same worldwide mutagenics movement that was embraced by the Nazis and well they caught they collaborate collaborate yeah I apparently collaborated with them in writing five right and and the guy who founded the eugenics movement was was Charles Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton yeah so I was applying Darwinian ideas to human breeding and Chester student was the only one who wrote a book length attack on the eugenics movement during that time it so but then these ideas they think were totally acted out the eugenic ideas were totally acted out in Germany and we we saw the horrors that came out of Germany the irony was that Germany was defeated twice in World War one and then World War two but the German professors all came to America and they brought in ejs philosophy with them well no but I just want to give one little quote about Nietzsche from Chesterton there's a little line that he says in his injustice in book orthodoxy says Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker he does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce and if he does not know certainly the ordinary evolutionists who talk about things being higher do not know either so he didn't know what he wanted men to evolve into but except this ever match the Superman and then you know it became this chaos it was bad men often times weaklings personally like Hitler who used the strength of others to destroy the weakness of the undesirables in their mind and Nietzsche knew that his ideas were chaotic he said but he said man must have chaos within so that he may give birth to a dancing star whatever that means he said whatever that means no I said whatever that okay so he said that man must have chaos to give birth to a dancing star now we we look you know at some of our politicians you know rahm emanuel for instance former Chicago or Illinois representative who says never let a problems live away never don't omit to seize the opportunity problem it's the same mentality than when there's a problem or a chaos that's an opportunity for us to do something else yeah they see they seize on the chaos and and Chester didn't just called out in EJ when he said yeah but you said never let a catastrophe go to waste yeah that's that's Rama man that's the line you were looking for yes so Chesterton calls out Nietzsche on on his whole chaotic thinking and in his the second chapter of his book orthodoxy was called the maniac and he says the the modern philosopher if we just follow his ideas they lead to madness they won't lead to mass if you just take any any of the ideas of the bonner philosopher and follow them out to their logical conclusion it ends in madness and then in self-destruction well Nietzsche is the perfect example of it Yeah right he ended in madness he he died in an insane asylum he spent the last 11 of his years as a gibbering idiot yeah and yet he's taught as a serious philosopher in all our universities it caused it he was he was truly an evil and insane thinker do they teach Chesterton who was good and who taught common sense no no they don't no as a matter of fact it's not just Rahm Emanuel who says never let a catastrophe waste you know we look at you know something for instance right now we see people who riot whenever there's the the World Economic meetings big groups of people come and wreck private citizens properties all over the world wherever they go and they bring that chaos and this is a standard procedure and I'm concerned that some already there's been some chaos with the protests against the Arizona law about immigration illegal immigration that this has already led to some chaos the governor just got some powder I mean it's the same Nietzschean meant right with you right just just just throw everything into chaos because we have to evolve beyond we have to move beyond good and evil do away with morality he says a belief in God is a sign of weakness a belief in morality and good and evil is a sign of weakness and we just destroy this with chaos and who already and he predicted that he was going to create well who is he Nietzsche predicted he would create this this chaos in the world yeah it was right unfortunately but yeah now what do we do about it what we just go back home and read a lot more chest well that's the first thing we do okay so we start by going back home and reading a lot more Chesterton okay all right and then we actually have to start making a difference ourselves like starting our own schools because the public education system doesn't work it doesn't do it either sit around and complain about the public education we have to educate our children so if we don't you know if you don't have a good home school set up where you have complete control then you have to start getting together with a group of concerned people and start doing the right thing to educate you and that's one thing you do but Chesterton says it all has to start in a local level and you know it's not going to ever be a top-down solution it has to be done by people so you start making differences at the local community with first with your family than the local community with your church and when people see that it's done right they will respond but see this is one of the things that you know in in this country it doesn't matter which party both of the major parties keep on pumping money into the education system for instance and it just seems to get worse and worse all it does it does and again it's a Chesterton and bellick is his great colleague they said it it it may have to completely collapse before we can start over and that's not fun well it's because that that sounds like this saying you know we can't we have to be careful there because that's not the whole eos that nietzsche one is exactly what they're bringing about by a topic but the problem is that you know we're creating a system that can't be sustained and it will collapse simply because we can't sustain it we can't we can't sustain the government right now we can't sustain the education system right now and so you know unless we start reforming them they will collapse that's we're seeing that in Greece yeah ya know Greece is beginning a collapses dein big government there but again if we start at the local level we can start making a difference just in our immediate area and hopefully it has a ripple effect around us yeah so you know it's it's near where are too often we're always waiting around for someone else to solve the problem and and we never realize it's our problem we have to start solving it so we started our own community yeah I think that that's going to a key element and another part of that is that we start off with ideas of what we do want good one of the things about Nietzsche is that he starts off with what he does not want hence chaos is desirable for somebody of that goofy mentality that's a very good point whereas Chesterton and who derives from our faith in our philosophy what he does want then gives us a vision of where we want to go and not just what we want to avoid that's very very good point father in fact he brings that up right at the beginning of what's wrong with the world because he says you know we all agree for instance that prostitution is bad but we don't all agree that purity is good yes and matter of fact there plenty people who may think that purity is bad it's no they'll say that sexual purity is sick you know I psychologically disordered that's the common teaching in textbooks in high school so so this is in the government-run schools so when you have a situation where everyone believes something is bad but not everyone believes in something that's good you and fix the system of traced on it so we have to first establish what the ideal is what is it that we're working for he says what's wrong the worlds that we don't ask what's right right and he said you know what's right with the world is that what we have to work for is the Christian ideal and that's that's the basis of his great quote which comes from that book the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting it's been found difficult and left untried yes and I dare say that I have to disagree with our president's statement in Turkey that we are not a Christian nation I would rather agree with the Supreme Court decision of 1799 which did say we are a Christian nation I'll go along with that Supreme Court decision yes so we're gonna take a little break and what we just want to remind you can find a lot of GK Chesterton's writings at ewtn religious catalogue so go to ewtn religious catalogue calm or call 1 800 850 4 6 3 1 6 1 800 8 5 4 6 3 1 6 and get the information about the books available to learn how to think clearly well and with a positive goal in mind such as Chesterton dit we'll be back in just a couple of minutes because you also want to get your questions and your comments as well as those our studio audience so please stay with us welcome back and we want you to be able to receive got something brand-new going on here EWTN has a free weekly email newsletters have to have email to get it or remember you can always go to your Public Library and get get an email account there believe me that's a lot better for you to be going to ewtn.com than it is where some of these other people are going in the public library so you can get our email newsletter called wings go to ewtn.com give us your email address and we'll get you that for free okay also we have a nice group of folks from different parts of the country from Atlanta and North Carolina and Michigan and Iowa Illinois and all sorts of places and it's great to have them and we'd love to have you come and join us too if you can make a pilgrimage contact our pilgrimage Department at two zero five two seven one two nine six six that's two zero five two seven one two nine six six or go to our website www.jfn.co.jp/toho local restaurants you know there you know I keep telling you how religious they are didn't I you've got hamburger heaven oh yeah now and then and then you've got barbecue no golden rule Barbic golden rule yeah like I said last night for those who are vegans then go get fried green tomatoes at the ironed out cafe gives you some black eyed peas butter beans or greens and anything else good for you to eat how does that sound that's pretty nice commercial or did you like it if you're not a vegan get you a chicken-fried steak let's go to some phone calls that start off with Larry Oh Larry hi father where are you from northeastern Pennsylvania great what's your question I like to ask mr. Alquist I've been watching your TV show and reading a lot of Chester's tune over the years and I couldn't help noticing a while ago you mentioned that he went to school to art school and I was wondering how he could possibly have been so knowledgeable about things like theology and philosophy with that kind of background well Chesterton went to art school but he dropped out of art school but he never went to the University and and so one of the reasons he is such a great thinker is that he did not have a university education now how much do you want to encourage that well think about that how much would you not want kids to go to college right now college is a very dangerous place parents have to be very very careful where they send their their kids to to universities in colleges today because in in 80% of the cases they are going to really have their faith attacked and they're their moral teachings attacked and everything that their parents have tried to provide for them completely and utterly undermined it causing universities and and so there are very there are a few good good Catholic schools around the country there's the Newman society but then there's the dinners there's also some good public universities that have really strong Newman centers that have have protected and provided and edified the kids faith so that it's really a huge decision and in many cases there's the recommendation in some cases would be don't send your kid to college and university because it may just destroy them you know that I was just at Texas A&M a couple of weeks ago and that's one of those campus ministries where you can become a great engineer and that veterinary and all sorts of other things but the Catholic Newman Center there is superb but I was also going to suggest a Newman Society as a place to go to to check out the Catholic schools yes and what their strengths are weaknesses and all and they'll give some great information on the best of the Catholic schools and we you know one of the things about getting a college education is there is a discipline that you can learn by being part of a class but again the danger is real for us to do question sir where are you from I'm from Seattle Washington great and you actually work your marketing department it's good to see your art what is your question well Dale you as a convert to the faith was there a defining moment on something you read that Chesterton wrote that allowed you to sort of turn the corner and come into the church thanks for that question art and Seattle is one of my favorite places in the world is the famous shrine of the original Starbucks Street Market I was thinking more terms of the seafood and the Chardonnay that they yes it was a good yeah but there were there were two two main things that that helped turn the corner for me in terms of of how Chesterton brought me into the Catholic faith and he he has brought many people into the Catholic faith he's guided them every step of the way and it as far as the defining moment there's one passage in his book on conversion called the Catholic Church in conversion oh yeah that's a great yeah or he says there's there's three stages of conversion the first step is you decide you're gonna be fair to the Catholic faith but he says there is no being fair to the Catholic faith there either for it or you're against it no nobody's neutral about it and so as soon as you stop being against it you start finding yourself being drawn towards it and then the second stage is discovering the Catholic faith just learning all these things that you never knew before and you know you've stopped me against so now you're you're actually listening you're taking it all in it's like being in a foreign country with all these exotic flowers and animals that you never heard of and you're just discovering and it's fun there's no commitment you can leave anytime you want and then comes the third stage running away from the Catholic faith because your your head has been convinced and you've you've cleared the the intellectual groundwork out of the way now your heart is telling you don't do it and then it's just an act of the will at that point and and you will find every excuse possible to avoid becoming Catholic and but eventually you stop finding excuse now yeah yeah you know God awesome et cetera that's that little hook in there and then Yanks it at some point and then you're caught and it's it's the most wonderful and total defeat that you could ever have in your life that's cool now there was one other moment that that wasn't directly connected to something that Chesterton wrote but it was something else that I read that made me that really turned me towards the Catholic Church and it had to do with a group of Chester Toni ins who wanted to promote Chesterton's cause for sainthood oh really yeah and as you know I was a Baptist and so I had no appreciation or understanding of the community of the Saints matter of fact in general there's a fairly strong rejection of you know devotion to the Saints fairly than wrong yeah in fact completely strong yeah we don't have any room for saints you pray directly to God you don't you don't mess with a saint getting between you and God right as soon as I heard the idea of Chesterton being canonized I had an epiphany I had an instantaneous understanding of the communion of the saints I knew exactly what it was about without anybody having to explain it to me I knew that Chesterton was in the presence of God I had no doubt about that I knew suddenly that Saints don't get between you and God they bring you closer to God right I knew that that Christianity can be an abstraction at times but Saints are models human beings who have lived the life that you can follow and you can emulate them because they're real and you can there's a here a real example you can false alson scenes for I understood that perfectly because Chester's had been a model for me to follow I understood that that there your advocate and that she asked your friends to pray for you and Chester just had been my friend and so I I wasn't afraid to ask him to pray for me and he also understood for the very first time that every saint has a cultists around him and I knew that I belong to the cult of Chesterton and I was okay we were in a cult yeah I'm telling you Holt I just told you and I was and I was okay with that and so sure most cult members are and so yeah yeah and so then then most of my other Chester Toni and friends were oh no that would be bad if Chesterton were canonized because he's such an ecumenical writer he appeals so broadly to to non Catholics as well as Catholics it would turn off all the Catholics and I said are you kidding I was the only only Baptist in the group only non Catholic in the group so are you kidding our idea of saints is that they're all these fourteen year old barefoot girls you know you need more 300-pound cigar-smoking Saints in the Catholic Church well there's a new criterion for the Holy Office all right let's go over to a caller we have Jesse on the line hello Jesse hello hi were you from California great and what's your question I just wanted to know if he has ever considered putting TK churches on the big screen along the lines of CS Lewis Chronicles of Narnia oh so great great suggestion Jesse great what do you think well I'm glad you asked that question I don't know who Jesse is I swear I don't know who Jesse is but we actually have just completed filming a movie based on a Chesterton novel what's novel it's called man alive okay and you know Cheston wrote about seven novels and Man Alive is a delightful delightful novel based on a character named innocent Smith and this is Smith as his name suggests is innocent although he's accused of attempted murder he's accused of multiple adultery he's accused of burglary he's accused of abandonment and he is guilty apparently of all these crimes caught red-handed in all these crimes and yet he's innocent how does that work I'm not going to tell you see yeah yep see I didn't think you would so you never do so we just we just produced it it's in its final post-production right now and as a matter of fact my daughter Ashley and my future son-in-law Eric are in the movie I see yeah yeah you know it's like we say in Chicago what did you want us to do a higher stranger yeah but it but there's there's also a great a great appearance by the actor who's in so many of our of our episodes Kevin O'Brien who will see probably later tonight yes all right another question here sir were you from from Naples Florida great and what's your question yeah you mentioned you were doing a program at a high school or starting a new high school with a program by G Chesterton GK Chesterton are you going to develop that so that it can be transported to other high schools and also my son and daughter-in-law homeschool is it something that a home schooler can adapt to their education great thanks for that question well our our hope is to create a a model with Chesterton Academy that other schools can follow and make our curriculum available so that home schoolers can take advantage of it as well we are really putting together the ideal curriculum the schools in its second year of existence right now we have just ninth and 10th grade will be adding 11th grade next year and then of course 12th grade after that Chesterton is the model thinker so it's not that we just teach Chesterton it's that he's the model thinker so we use that kind of thinking that we that we teach and then each each ear ends with a Chesterton text for each class that they study but it is absolutely the curriculum that we intend to make available on a wider use it's not ready yet but it's on its way to being ready let me ask you this are you giving them any art classes for them to drop out of well I'll tell you every every student at the school learns how to draw and it's amazing go to our website at Chesterton Academy or you'll see some of our students drawings and these kids have never drawn before just fabulous you know I'll never forget fourth grade and all of us had run the teachers showing off all the pictures and then when I came to mind the whole class because angels you're the flutter wings and where are you from I'm from st. Louis Missouri father with theatre of the word incorporated Dale has had me help him put his shows together for many years now and I love doing it it's a real grace to be here and I also have a series on EWTN the theatre of the word that people can watch just in case anybody didn't know that you have no idea Dale how many people tell me that your show is their favorite show on EWTN so for your viewers who haven't seen it they really need to tune in because it's it's a very interesting show and also very entertaining my question is when I first started reading Chesterton about 13 or 14 years ago if you talk to people about him or searched on the internet you would find very few references to him now he's all over the place and I want to find out more about your local societies because I know you were earlier talking about do things locally and get things going I know you've got local societies how do people start them and how do they help spread the word about Chesterton thanks Kevin thanks for your kind words yeah you're a good guy yeah and and the only reason people say that the show that my show is their favorite shows because they haven't seen your show and they should watch your show okay oh yeah I'm sorry okay Kevin plays just one amazing roll after another in our series but in the new season he's going to be portraying Nietzsche and we filmed it today and it was it made your blood ran cold to see Vijay express his philosophy on on camera it was it was stunning but to answer Kevin's question we have these local society starting really all over the country we have over 30 of them now around the country just a group of people to get together and read chesterton on a regular basis and they learn his thinking and there's just the easiest thing to start in the world because you used to have a regular time to meet a regular place to meet and start going through a text together we have lots of suggestions on how to get through a text together just read quotations that sometimes that can be a delightful way we have college organizations around the country where or you know college kids don't a lot of times we extra reading so each each student comes to the meeting with a favorite chesterton quote and they talk about that all night long because you can do that with the chesterton quotation you know you can move around everyone can share their own quotation and they're really easy to do but they've been very effective in helping chesterton be exposed to more people because he's not taught in schools he's people don't learn about and intimidated by reading a book just by themselves if they're reading it with a group of people you know that they learned the text that way another thing that happens out of local Chesterton society is that people who come to him will become Catholic and in our local society in the Twin Cities we had not one not two not three not four we had five people received into the Catholic Church from our local group at the Easter Vigil coldest last one day and you know one one of the things they could also do is get the DVDs of your shows and and show those and and perhaps when that play comes out the the movie of that novel they can go through that and and then talk about that as well yeah that's that's a great way to have a meeting is to just watch one of the shows and discuss it and one of Kevin's one of the shows that was on Kevin series was a Chesterton Father Brown mystery they're full a full length father round mystery that was on theatre the word and I will say that that's the best thing that II W 10 is ever produced ever was that Father Brown episode it looks like masterpiece the inner quality it's just just beautiful beautiful production of Father Brown ministry the honor of Israel Gao that's a great way to have a media's watch that show we have another caller hello hello hi and where are you from a Pennsylvania great and what's your question my question is for mr. Alquist since Chesterton wrote so much where is a good place to start reading him also a follow up any more of the delightful father brown CDs that mr. O'Brien did I just finished listening to them they were great all right so what would be a good place to begin with Chesterton now father this is gonna sound like it's a self-serving answer okay I'm prepared go ahead see I I never I was always upset with with whatever answer I used to give to that question because every time I recommended a book to start with I never felt it was the right chest for the book to start with so then I wrote a book and that's the book to start because the book I wrote is really designed to introduce people to Chesterton and then you can read my second book but I asked I wrote a book called the apostle of common sense which is based on the series that we created sugar beauties and that is designed to to bring people in he did write so much the caller is exactly right it is intimidating how much he wrote where do you begin my book is just like the window the door that you get you get through and then the world of chessmen is open to you but the Apostle commonsense is one book common sense 101 lessons from GK Chesterton that's by theme that's Chesterton's different topics he writes about and when I say I wrote the book all I did was dodge between Chesterton quotations that's all I did know but then after they read your book yeah Jenny at some point start reading Chesterton himself I guess so okay now call this some of the his important books obviously his two most important books are orthodoxy and the everlasting man orthodoxy is about how he became a Christian and his amazing discovery of the faith he's written before he's a Catholic but you don't even know that when you read it he's truly talking about that story become a Catholic for some years after that yeah it was 14 years after he wrote that book yeah and then the everlasting man is it's certainly one of the masterpieces of Catholic apologetics ever written he just puts together history and philosophy and and puts it all together showing how the only explanation for what's happened in history is the Christian explanation that I I really think that those two books are the best place to start you to get his thought because from that everything else does flow after you read my two books those are the best but then I quickly meant you know what's wrong with the world the book we've already talked about tonight that's a that's an actually a relatively easy book to read his book on saint francis of assisi is a very accessible book the book on st. Thomas Aquinas the deluxe is a is a great great book so and then you have to read the Father Brown stories and then you can start working on the poetry too but if you look at what's wrong with the world and heretics and you see some of the the different movements of thought that he's criticizing back in those days and while you may not know the specific individuals he's mentioning you do understand that the same ideas are around exactly as you had said early in the show that you know these ideas are still around right and they're there they are causing more havoc than they did then because they're being played out yeah and then of course he wrote thousands of essays so any book of Chesterton essays is always a delightful reading you'll always learn something it'll always be somehow hitting some contemporary issue he always manages to hit something that's true right now yeah and there's also gilbert magazine there is gilbert magazine the magazine our American Chesterton society publishes and that it's the only month and a half Li published it comes out comes out every month and a half and and it's it's got some Chester and essays been quotations but articles on everything that's going on politics art and economics everything we handle it all it's the best magazine in the world Inc that's amazing I'm amazed it's good to have you know that that's stuff available and you know as people do learn in some ways antidotes see that's that's one of the ways I like to see Chesterton he's an antidote to the common moods because too often people are not thinking through the issues they are empathizing with one faction or another and instead of thinking through the issue oh but I feel so sorry for them and then you make a decision based on this that reminds me of those two brothers that killed their parents and one of the there was a hung jury and one of the jurors said well haven't I suffered enough they lost their parents after all they say that's not good thing and so this is an antidote to that kind of emotional rising Chesterton said to become Catholic does not mean leaving off thinking it means learning how to think yes Chesterton does teach you how to think it's just you know gives you the simple philosophical principles you need on which to build clear thinking and that's oftentimes the opposite of what people say about Catholicism now you got to check your brain at the door that's not the case you learn how to think I must watch more cleverly in Chesterton you know could out debate anybody he debated all the leading thinkers of his time and he usually did a very good job of annihilating them on the platform yeah and yet he did it with such charity that they couldn't get angry at him so he's the model Christian in that way he knows how to how to deal with his enemies he loves his enemies because the whole purpose of the bate is not to crush and humiliate your enemy it's to pulverize their ideas you attack your ideas take those apart and and hopefully you win them over to your side that's what you're trying to do is get them over to your side this would be a good thing to put on a lot of talk TV yeah well thank you you know we run out of time it's great to see you back to do this news material and let us beat know about it so thank you very much being here thank you and may the Lord bless all of you and let his face shine upon you and lead you but this is peace the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit amen you know we're able to bring you these programs sometimes dramatizations as well as teachings about Chesterton and so many other topics only because this network is brought to you by you you make this network possible by your donations and we still wanted to do as Mother Angelica always asked us keep us in between your gas bill and your electric bill and we'll be able to pay all of our bills god bless you thank you very much

Channel: EWTN

Views: 34,161

Rating: 4.75419 out of 5

Keywords: EWTN, Fr. Mitch Pacwa, Dale Ahlquist, G.K. Chesterton, EWTN Live, Catholic

Id: 87cjf6sZO60

Length: 56min 31sec (3391 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2010