Colin Jory has drawn my attenton to this edifying, encouraging and thought-provoking letter in the New Oxford Review. It’s from a professor of literature and lifelong Baptist who confesses a love for great Catholic writers, such as Flannery O’Connor, Wilde, Newman and Pope, but especially for the great G. K. Chesterton. I especially like the way that she considers those of her students who admire Chesterton to be as diamonds whereas Lewis and Tolkien lovers are a dime-a-dozen. Here’s the text of the letter: 
 
As a lifelong Baptist, now teaching literature and poetics at a Baptist university, I’m fairly safe from making the mistake G.K. Chesterton astutely accuses the psychologist of making: that of pretending to analyze the whole of which I am a part. For the fact is that literature worth studying rarely, if ever, comes from Baptists. So I thank the Catholics (along with the Anglicans, and a few Luther­ans and Presbyterians) for much of the good literature. And for Chester­ton too.

I jest, of course, but am completely serious when I thank the NOR and Chene Richard Heady for an excellent introduction to Ignatius Press’s newly published Volume 36 of The Collected Works of G.K. Chester­ton (Sept.).

My dirty little Protestant secret is that when upon occasion a lover of Chesterton (or O’Connor or Wilde or Newman or Pope) rises up from among the dime-a-dozen Lewis and Tolkien lovers that populate my classes, my heart warms a bit, and my esteem of such a student rises not imperceptibly with such near-certain assurance of said student’s good taste.

While the denominational partisan in me might inwardly cry, Why, oh why, do the Catholics have all the good writers? (the answers to which form the basis of an entire graduate course I teach), Dr. Heady’s fine review reminds me of at least some of the reasons. For it seems to me — as an outsider looking in — that it’s the long view offered by the Roman Catholic Church that informs the metaphysical insight, the understanding, and the appreciation of paradox, as well as the sheer optimism of Ches­ter­ton so keenly pointed out in the review. Dr. Heady himself reflects these Chestertonian characteristics in applying the insights of his subject to 21st-century concerns — notably, for example, the New Atheists who, as Heady points out, paradoxically affirm the notions of truth they seek to dismiss in their self-destructing efforts.

Reading this review as I did in the twilight of one of the most depressing presidential elections I’ve lived through, it was refreshing, too, to read of Chesterton’s “hope that the death of the state will be the birth of the family.” Such a belief, expressed, again, within the context of a long view, is enough to make me feel a good deal of Chesterton’s “pessimistic optimism.” And enough to make me feel more catholic — perhaps even a bit Catholic — too.

Karen Swallow Prior
Chair, Depts. of English & Modern Languages, Liberty University
Lynchburg, Virginia