For
Chesterton , Truth matters. In this, he is well aware of the use of the Greek term behind the English “heretic” to describe one who makes a choice or takes a position; and he joins the ranks of heretics who embrace their heresies as orthodoxies, as positions that are
true. He contends, “we dismiss the two opposite dangers of bigotry and fanaticism, bigotry which is a too great vagueness and fanaticism which is a too great concentration.” It would be difficult to imagine two more relevant dangers at the beginning of the twenty-first century than bigotry and fanaticism. That makes the time right for another look at Chesterton’s third way.
About the author
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a larger-than-life writer who fascinates and perplexes us to this day. An art student who became a poet, and then by turns a journalist, playwright, biographer, novelist, storyteller, philosopher, and “Christian apologist, ” his fame rested on an uncanny ability to produce vast quantities of crystalline prose quickly and without apparent effort. His fiction—particularly the Father Brown stories and the delirious suspense novel
The Man Who Was Thursday—remains his most widely read and entertaining works.