Writer · apologist · Anglican, later Roman Catholic
G. K. Chesterton
Born
1874
Died
1936
English writer, journalist and critic whose essays, fiction and books of Christian apology, including Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925), defended traditional Christianity; he was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1922.
Chesterton's essays of 1905 on Kipling, Shaw, Wells, Moore and other contemporaries, arguing that a person's view of the universe is the most practical thing about them and that modern thought had lost its first principles; the forerunner of Orthodoxy.
Chesterton's account of how he came to accept the Apostles' Creed, arguing through paradox and personal narrative that Christian orthodoxy best explains human experience, reason, wonder and morality. Written in 1908 as a companion to Heretics.
Chesterton's short life of Francis of Assisi, written soon after his reception into the Catholic Church, presenting Francis as a troubadour and lover of God whose poverty, joy and stigmata make sense only in the light of the cross.
