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“Orthodoxy is a most wonderful and puzzling book. Chesterton is a man of blazing insight and gymnastic poetry, but his weakness seems to be a contradiction between his love for tradition and his desire for wrecking society in order to make it continually better. And yet there is a sense I get while reading him that I agree 100% with what he is saying, while disagreeing with how he is saying it. It is a baffling experience, but a wonderful one. Chesterton shows through logic, analysis of history, human nature, romance (in the word's older sense), and fairy tales that spirituality is a wise way of looking at the world, and that orthodoxy -- Christian orthodoxy specifically -- is the wisest way of being spiritual. This discourse takes the form of Chesterton's own philosophical journey for a new and original worldview and his discovery that all of it was already in orthodoxy. Though a liberal, Chesterton's greatest point really does echo the conservatives: for though he praises reform, he emphasizes most often moral reform, which the conservative has ever felt to be the only reform worth attempting. This book is one of the best books I have ever read, dispite the content that I disagree with. The magnificent and expansive truth in this book is greater than the small amount of error, if error it is. Every skeptic -- and as well every Christian -- should read this book; and that kind of statement is one I don't like making in general, and one I don't believe I have ever made before. ”
Michael wrote this review Thursday, October 16 2008.
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