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.