Finished Reading “Heretics”

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  "G. K. Chesterton, the "Prince of Paradox," is at his witty best in this collection of twenty essays and articles from the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on  "heretics" - those who pride themselves on their superiority to Christian views - Chesterton appraises prominent figures who fall into that category from the literary and art worlds... those who hold incomplete and inadequate views about "life, the universe, and everything." He is, in short, criticizing all that host of non-Christian views of reality, as he demonstrated in his follow-up book Orthodoxy. The book is both an easy read and a difficult read. But he manages to demonstrate, among other things, that our new 21st century heresies are really not new because he himself deals with most of them." (Goodreads)

For Daily Reading, Next Year

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Leo Tolstoy had an idea: collect wisdom from “the best and wisest people” such as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, Socrates, Matthew Arnold, The New Testament, and others, and compile into a single book for short, daily “devotional” reading. Peter Sekirin writes, “This was Leo Tolstoy’s last major work. . . . preparing three revised editions between 1904 and 1910. It was his own favorite everyday reading, a book he would turn to regularly for the rest of his life.” Tolstoy arranged the collected wisdom of the ages with some of his own writing by topic.  His book was banned by Russia from 1912 until 1995, when it was republished . . . In Russian. The first English translation was made in 1996. I’ll be supplementing my daily reading this next year with Tolstoy’s “Daily Calendar of Wisdom.”

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