Chesterton
Dear Friends and Readers:
I have been asked to speak at the 36th annual The American Chesterton Conference being held in Colorado Springs, Colorado, July 27-29.
https://www.chesterton.org/36th-annual-chesterton-conference/
The title of this year’s conference is “The Tyranny of the Learned,” and I’ll be speaking on Chesterton as an amateur ancient historian who often got the details wrong but had a deeper insight than many scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of ancient history.
Other speakers include Dale Ahlquist, founder and president of the American Chesterton Society, my former colleague Christopher Check, who is now president of Catholic Answers, Joseph Pearce, and many others.
If you love Chesterton and the time and place are convenient, you should consider attending. Make sure to tell them you heard it from The Fleming Foundation.
With every good wish, I am
Faithfully yours,
Thomas Fleming
Dr. Fleming,
I am delighted you will participate. Everyone loves Chesterton. I was involved with a Belloc society thirty years ago but it is is now defunct because the “old cantankerous one” was not as admired and the few loyalists who wanted to keep his memory alive have now died or too old to remember his lines. I even recently met a young priest from a traditional order who explained to me Mr. Belloc was more of a controversialist than a historian, more bigoted than charitable and more cantankerous than say. Christopher Dawson. This is of course all pure BS promulgated by the same or similar folks who dislike Rocky Ithaca, Cincinnatus, The Georgics of Virgil, the free peasantry of the Middle Ages, Southern yeomen before the slaughter, and agrarians who could still admire even in the 20th century . In other words people who hate that strand of our civilization that has endured longest. Chesterton is different, much more jovial and humorous comfortable in different settings while his followers always seem to admire a cocktail and good story. If I miss Rockford, it is still in the air, I might make Colorado Springs to say hello and pay my respects.
Years ago, through the kindness of Fr, Ian Boyd and the International Chesterton Society, I did a fair amount of lecturing and writing on Chesterton. I also ended up doing talks at the Midwest Chesterton Society, which is how I got to know Dale Ahlquist. When I went out into the cold, Dale was kind enough to interview me for their magazine Gilbert. I am by no means a Chesterton scholar, but I am able to write what I hope are interesting lectures by talking about Chesterton’s views on things I do know something about, e.g., Roman history, journalism. My favorite piece of his fiction, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, is a beautiful rendering of several important strands of political thought that interest me, namely, confederalism and the petty identities of guild and neighborhood. Over the years, I met many interesting people at conferences, including Philip Jenkins and Owen Dudley Edwards. It will be a pleasure to be back among Chestertonians after rather many years.
Congrats Dr. Fleming on the invite. Would be tempted to get out to Colorado if only I were free. I remember getting a copy of
The Everlasting Man back around 1984, a nice old library copy, and taking it with me when traveling to England for my sister’s wedding. It
made a big impression on me, not to mention it was very entertaining. Knock ’em dead.