Category: G.K. Chesterton
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Manic Pixie Dream Girl — a Defense
Nathan Rabin, film critic and cultural agnostic, coined the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in 2007. It’s grown in popularity enough that the Nabokovian satirist and aspiring Russian Train Baron Patrick Rothfuss has this to say about himself: So folks — at least certain folks residing in Wisconsin who read The A.V. Club — are…
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A Defense of Baby Worship
The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children [and tempt them towards baby worship] are, first, that children are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools and sages have…
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Sitting at the Feet of the Hogwarts Headmaster
Sgt. John Granger of the United States Marine Corps (stationed in Japan) was proud to say that he was perfectly normal, thank you very much. He was the last person you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious — especially invocational magic — and the last person you would expect to become a Hogwarts headmaster…
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children are innocent and love justice
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. – GK Chesterton
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Palliative Care for Imprisonism Literature
In the last few decades it grew popular for critics to predict and mourn the death of the novel. The death of the novel is really the death of their particular kind of novel: imprisonism literature. It’s as if someone said at their father’s funeral: “Fatherhood is dead to me” or before their own suicide…
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Civilization has run ahead
Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks. — GK Chesterton in The London Daily News
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Maps of Meaning Lecture Series
HUGE thanks to Dr. Cirilla for introducing me to Dr. Jordan Peterson. I highly recommend folks take the time to sift through the Maps of Meaning lecture series by Dr. Peterson — it singly handedly redeemed the entire field of psychology and psychiatry from the baggage of my youth:
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A Defense of Boring Personalities
No boring subject exists, just bored people. Boring personalities tend to find the subjects they bore into quite fascinating, stimulating, and they usually emerge as experts in their field. Bored people are cool, but dilettantes. My bride’s mother used to tell her essentially that good girls should never be bored. At first blush, I hated…
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Science Establishes Agnosticism
“The general notion that science establishes agnosticism is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Science is Latin for knowledge. Agnosticism is the Greek for ignorance. It is not evident that ignorance is the goal of knowledge. It is the ignorance and not the knowledge that produces the…
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A Defense of Spoilers
Spoilers showed up this Christmas, my niece — who’s two years old — gave my sister-in-law and brother-in-law two presents. Both were wrapped. She’d decided exactly what she wanted to give to both of them. Each parent had helped her wrap the present for the other parent. And she wanted to give them first. On…
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Weakness of Journalism
“It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding.…
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A Defense of Criticism
Everyone’s a critic, but should they be? Everyone uses criticism, but does everyone do it well? We live in an age of criticism, an age that destroys a thing to find out what it is, an age that loves to criticize and has all but forgotten how to edify. For this reason, you’ll often find…