A Brief Book Summary from Books At a Glance
by Kevin Walker
Introduction
In Orthodoxy, Chesterton sets out to outline his intellectual journey to the Christian faith. Rather than a work of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy is a loose autobiographical narrative detailing Chesterton’s thought process during his exploration of religious, philosophical, social, and political ideas. That process, of course, ended with his embrace of Christianity. In an attempt to break from cultural norms and blaze an intellectual path of his own Chesterton tried to create an original philosophical position, one he initially thought heretical to the common thinking of his day. In the end, he discovered that the heresy he had invented was not at all novel; it was thousands of years old, discovered and articulated by a long-standing Christian tradition. His heresy was, in fact, orthodoxy.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Introduction in Defense of Everything Else
Chapter 2: The Maniac
Chapter 3: The Suicide of Thought
Chapter 4: The Ethics of Elfland
Chapter 5: The Flag of the World
Chapter 6: The Paradoxes of Christianity
Chapter 7: The Eternal Revolution
Chapter 8: The Romance of Orthodoxy
Chapter 9: Authority and the Adventurer
Summary
Chapter 1: An Introduction in Defense of Everything Else
How is it that the world can, at times, feel so familiar in so many ways, and yet so unfamiliar in others? This book attempts to answer that question through an exploration of faith. For Chesterton, this work is an account of his ambitious effort to discern truth in the modern age, only to discover that the truth he found was already ancient wisdom, centuries older than he had figured. What he thought was heretical, a dangerously original spiritual insight about the cosmos and those who populate it, was in fact just an old truth; it was orthodoxy. . . .
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