ChesterCast

Merry Christmas, and in honor of the glorious day, I’ve pushed ahead to do the chapter on Christmas, the Salvation Army, and the philosophy of Comte.

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The conclusion to GK Chesterton’s chapter on HG Wells.

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Today, after a long wait while I lived in China and catechism, I have finally been baptized into the Catholic Church in Suwon, South Korea.

If you are interested, you can follow the link for photos:: http://www.flickr.com/gp/11179904@N06/UyUf0f

Our fifth podcast from Heretics by GK Chesterton. The Heretic this week is science fiction writer HG Wells, and the heresy is the hero worship that, in the old story of Jack and the Beanstalk, has us rooting for the giants.

This was a long chapter, so it is divided into two podcasts, each about sixteen minutes in length. Please forgive the background noise. I’m going to try and buy a unidirectional microphone soon, and hopefully that will cut down on it.

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Sorry for that delay and thanks for your patience. Things are back and track. I recorded the fifth chapter of Heretics (HG Wells) over the last hour or so, but it’s midnight here in Korea, and cleaning up an episode tends to take between one and two hours of my time (yes, I make that many mistakes when I read), so I’m going to get some sleep. The next chapter will be uploaded sometime in the next 24 hours.

I know I said I would upload an episode today.

However, I just had a wisdom tooth extracted, and so I really don’t feel like sitting down and reading outloud.

It’s final exams week, but I’ll still record and upload the next chapter, probably on Tuesday. It’s a long chapter (HG Wells), so I might split it in half.

Also, Therese asked that the show be cast in mp3. All old episodes have been updated to use mp3 instead of m4a files. So hopefully they will work with a wider range of players now. Sorry it took so long for me to upload them.

Tell your friends where they can get free GK Chesterton audiobooks!

Our fourth podcast from the book Heretics, written in 1905 by GK Chesterton.

This chapter is the heresy of George Bernard Shaw, which begins with relativism and proceeds to a form of Nietzschean thought.

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I figured I should lay out what I expect my schedule to be.

I intend to release at least one cast a week, between 15 and 25 minutes in length, for as long as I have source material to read from. I put a heavy emphasis on at least. I will try very hard to release at least one cast per week, but if I feel like doing more, I will feel free to post them, so I’ve posted three casts so far, and recorded one more that will be posted as soon as I clean it up a little bit.

If there is ever a week when I don’t have any GK Chesterton to read from, I will read from some other, related, public domain books, most likely something by Belloc. Frankly though, I have enough Chesterton to last at least a few months, and can obtain years worth from the Internet.

The podcast will always be readings from public domain audio books related to Chesterton, and never stuff about me. It’s ChesterCast, not WalkerCast. If I have anything to say myself, I will write it as text right here.

Of course, comments and emails, even negative comments provided they are not abusive, are very welcome. If there is some little detail about the podcast that grates you, you do me a much bigger favor by letting me correct it than you could cause me injury by pointing out that an amateur broadcaster is actually an amateur who has a lot to learn.

Plus, it’s a wonderful feeling to know that I’m not putting hours into this only to toss my voice off into an empty void.

Someone asked me in email if GK Chesterton played a role in my conversion (I am a former atheist), so I suppose I can share my answer here also, though a bit expanded because I’ve thought of more I’d like to say since then:

Short answer: No, I was already Christian when I read my first Chesterton book (Orthodoxy). But he did have a lot of influence on the type of Christian I became. When I converted, I had something like the Quakers in mind, and I only attended Catholic church because it was the only church available in Beihai, China, and when you are attending church service in a foreign land, a strict liturgy is very helpful also.

Longer answer: Probably the most influential writer in converting me to Christianity was CS Lewis in Mere Christianity. That’s overstating it a bit, because it really was a whole series of things happening one after the other. I became acutely aware, all at once, how angry many of my atheist friends were compared to my Christian friends, and how it had rubbed off on me.

Which inspired me to go read the New Testament and bits of the OT to see if it could really be as bad as I had always taken it to be, and while doing so I had what I can only describe as a “born again experience”. I know that’s a term generally used by evangelicals, but I don’t know of any other term for what I experienced. To be honest, at that point I assumed it was something of a hysteria, until I read CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which kind of laid the intellectual framework for me accepting Christianity rationally as well.

At that time, however, what I had in mind was the Quakers. I may have been a Christian, but I wasn’t about to believe a single word that I couldn’t verify with my own reason. Stuff about Mary being swept up into Heaven on a cloud was definitely right out.

GK Chesterton (Orthodoxy) *did* play a big role in making me Catholic, and seeing orthodox Catholicism as a good thing.

I’m not sure which bits of Orthodoxy really worked best, so much as I think needed to see things from the other side of the fence. I’m a young man ( 27. Nintendo generation, and if anyone is interested in hearing my “Defense of Nintendo”, you need only ask, and I will write you a book on the subject. ), and I think I never had the case for a ‘traditional’, ‘conservative’ view really made to me, but I had all sorts of people in my life, especially teachers, who, looking back, wanted very much to turn me into a ‘free spirit’.

GK Chesterton made that case to me, and suddenly a great many things that had always frustrated me and infuriated me and even confused me about the world made sense. I could always see what people were doing, but I could never really see what they were trying to do, especially conservatives.

And when Chesterton gave me a vision of what the Catholic Church has, historically, in her good times and bad times, been trying to do, I felt that it fit my image of what we should be trying to do a lot more than Protestantism or my former atheism.

For that matter, when Belloc said that my atheism was a logical consequence of the Reformation having run its course…I couldn’t help but agree with him (though I have a great many Protestant friends who are in a very real sense closer to Christ than I am and who are probably very angry to read that).

I wrote a great deal more than I needed to (and I’ve actually cut a great deal out that meandered to far off topic), so I will stop here.

I will post chapter four, on Mr Bernard Shaw, in the next few hours, as well as upload MP3 versions of the first two chapters.

This is our third chapter from GK Chesterton’s Hertics, written in 1905. From now on, uploads will be in MP3 for enhanced compatibility. MP3 versions of the earlier chapters will be posted soon also. Our Heretic for this chapter is Rudyard Kipling, and the heresy is how Kipling’s cosmopolitan worldliness caused him to miss a very important detail: the world itself.

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Our second podcast from the book Heretics, written in 1905 by GK Chesterton.

In the second chapter, “The Negative Spirit”, GK Chesterton discusses the problems with “realism” in morality. Chesterton uses the work of Henrik Ibsen, a late 19th century playright, as his example of “realist morality”, however what he says can be applied to most modern media.

On a technical note, I think I have gotten rid of alot of the background noise that existed in the first chapter. Let me know if you have any advice or comments.

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This is our first podcast from the book Heretics, written in 1905 by GK Chesterton. Forgive some of the background noise, this is my first podcast. Please enjoy, and comments are welcome.

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Welcome! In the next few days, I will begin casting readings from Heretics, a book written in 1905 by Catholic apologist G.K. Chesteron, a writer who has had great influence on me, and I hope to share him with you. I hope to go through the entire book in the next month or so.

Chesterton wrote Heretics at the turn of the century in order to explain why he felt many popular attitudes of the time were unwise, and many of the attitudes are prevalent today. The book is grouped into chapters, each one about a “heretic” and his heresy. Chesterton explains what he means when he refers to a close friend, George Bernard Shaw, as a ‘heretic’:

“I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive. I am concerned with him as a Heretic — that is to say, as a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong. I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done.”