G. K. Chesterton

• 29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936 (age 62).
• Anglican / Unitarian upbringing.
• Married Frances Blogg.
• Converted 30 July 1922 (age 48).

Grace

You say grace before meals. All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
and grace before the concert and pantomime,
and grace before I open a book,
and grace before sketching, painting, swimming,
fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Bibliography

The Works of G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton, G.K. (2009-05-13). The Works of G. K. Chesterton (36 Books with active table of contents) (Kindle Locations 29-51). DD Books. Kindle Edition.

Father Brown

• The Innocence of Father Brown
• The Wisdom of Father Brown

Novels

• The Ball and the Cross
• The Barbarism of Berlin
• The Club of Queer Trades
• The Flying Inn
• Magic
• Manalive
• The Man Who Was Thursday
• The Napoleon of Notting Hill
• The Trees of Pride

Non-Fiction

• Alarms and Discursions
• Appreciations and Criticism
• All Things Considered
• The Appetite of Tyranny
• The Crimes of England
• Eugenics and Other Evils
• Heretics
• Irish Impressions
• A Miscellany of Men
• The New Jerusalem
• Orthodoxy
• A Short History of England
• The Superstition of Divorce
• Tremendous Trifles
• Twelve Types
• Utopia of Usurers
• Varied Types
• The Victorian Age in Literature
• What I Saw in America
• What's Wrong With the World

Biographies

• Lord Kitchener
• Robert Browning
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Shaw

Other works

• The Catholic Church and Conversion

Quotations

• "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."
• “This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.”
• "We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world . . . It is by that test that history will really judge, of any Church, whether it is the real Church or no" (Ffinch, 277).
• "The difficulty of explaining why I am a Catholic is that there are 10,000 reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true" (O'Brien, 231).
• A "holiday" is "a holy day, a word that will always answer the ignorant slander which [says] that religion was opposed to human cheerfulness, and will always assert that when a day is holy, it should also be happy; a restoring thing that, by a blast of magic, turns man into himself" (The Universe According to G. K. Chesterton, 54-55).
• "If there were no God, there would be no atheists" (G.K. Chesterton. "Where All Roads Lead", 1922).
• “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
• “The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.”

Prayer for the Beatification of GKC

God our Father,

You filled the life of your servant Gilbert Keith Chesterton
with a sense of wonder and joy,
and gave him a faith which was the foundation of his ceaseless work;
a hope which sprang from his enduring gratitude for the gift of human life;
and a charity towards all men, particularly his opponents.

May his innocence and his laughter,
his constancy in fighting for the Christian faith in a world losing belief,
his lifelong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary
and his love for all men,
especially for the poor,
bring cheerfulness to those in despair,
conviction and warmth to lukewarm believers
and the knowledge of God to those without faith.

We beg you to grant the favours we ask
through his intercession
so that his holiness may be recognised by all
and the Church may proclaim him Blessed.

We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Links

• Wikipedia, "G. K. Chesterton."
• Prayer for the Beatification of G. K. Chesterton.
• "Chesterton's Conversion Story."