Wisdom And Innocence

Through years of meticulous research and access to the literary estate of G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce presents a major biography of a 20th century literary giant, providing a great deal of important information on GKC never before published. This is a thoroughly readable and delightful biography of a multi-faceted author, artist and debater who loved the friendship of children, idolized his wife and enjoyed great friendships with the likes of Hillaire Belloc, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Illustrated.

Through years of meticulous research and access to the literary estate of G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce presents a major biography of a 20th century literary giant, providing a great deal of important information on GKC never before published. This is a thoroughly readable and delightful biography of a multi- faceted author, artist and debater who loved the friendship of children, idolized his wife and enjoyed great friendships with the likes of Hillaire Belloc, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Illustrated.

"Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16, KJV)."We don't hear much about wisdom in the modern-day churches and, when we do, we hear little about innocence. This day and age is a time of self-serving religion on its best day, not to mention what it is on the worst of days! The King James Version reads "harmless as a dove" whereas the New American Standard reads, "...innocent as doves." Either way, I see a lot of wise people who can preach, teach, prophesy, and more, yet they lack the ability to be innocent or harmless, aka gentle. This book is designed to bring the body of Christ, especially leaders of any vocation, to learn what it is to be innocent and wise at the same time. There's a very good reason as to why God gave such explicit instruction; it's because He understands that, like Lucifer, we can be the wisest of them all yet allow our wisdom to be corrupted by pride.

The seventeenth-century poet and divine Thomas Traherne finds innocence in every stage of existence. He finds it in the chaos at the origins of creation as well as in the blessed order of Eden. He finds it in the activities of grace and the hope of glory, but also in the trials of misery and even in the abyss of the Fall. Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Theology traces innocence through Traherne’s works as it transgresses the boundaries of the estates of the soul. Using grammatical and literary categories it explores various aspects of his poetic theology of innocence, uncovering the boundless desire which is embodied in the yearning cry: ’Were all Men Wise and Innocent...’ Recovering and reinterpreting a key but increasingly neglected theme in Traherne’s poetic theology, this book addresses fundamental misconceptions of the meaning of innocence in his work. Through a contextual and theological approach, it indicates the unexplored richness, complexity and diversity of this theme in the history of literature and theology.

G. K. Chesterton is remembered as a brilliant creator of nonsense and satirical verse, author of the Father Brown stories and the innovative novel, The Man who was Thursday, and yet today he is not counted among the major English novelists and poets. However, this major new biography argues that Chesterton should be seen as the successor of the great Victorian prose writers, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, and above all Newman. Chesterton's achievement as one of the great English literary critics has not hitherto been fully recognized, perhaps because his best literary criticism is of prose rather than poetry. Ian Ker remedies this neglect, paying particular attention to Chesterton's writings on the Victorians, especially Dickens. As a social and political thinker, Chesterton is contrasted here with contemporary intellectuals like Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells in his championing of democracy and the masses. Pre-eminently a controversialist, as revealed in his prolific journalistic output, he became a formidable apologist for Christianity and Catholicism, as well as a powerful satirist of anti-Catholicism. This full-length life of G. K. Chesterton is the first comprehensive biography of both the man and the writer. It draws on many unpublished letters and papers to evoke Chesterton's joyful humour, his humility and affinity to the common man, and his love of the ordinary things of life.