Education and Evangelization

The call for a New Evangelization – the “urgent need to proclaim the Gospel afresh in a highly secularized environment” (Benedict XVI) – has huge implications for Catholics in education, both at home and at school. Both are places of evangelization. “The mission of the Church is to evangelize,” according to the Congregation for Catholic Education, “for the interior transformation and the renewal of humanity. For young people, the school is one of the ways for this evangelization to take place.” The home is the first and most important school we attend, and parents our primary educators, no matter where we go later.

The Catholic understanding of evangelization places a priority on personal conversion and “interior transformation” – in that sense it is radically distinct from proselytism, which aims at exterior measures and effects (bottoms on seats, faces in pews, money in the collection). This is something we need to get right, as Pope Francis keeps insisting. If we do, there is just a chance that fewer of our children will lapse as they grow older, and more will find themselves able to speak of their faith with confidence to the world around them.

Evangelization does not stop with religious instruction or liturgy but even affects what is taught and the way it is taught. The Incarnation is not some piece of historical information that, once communicated, can be forgotten while we turn our minds to geography or biology or mathematics. If true, faith changes everything, even the way we view the cosmos. Once that primary lesson is learned, there are no “boring” subjects any longer. Nothing can be ugly or pointless unless we make it so. (Chesterton once said, “Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.”) Faith alters the way every subject is taught as well as the relationships between them. It connects them severally and together to our destiny, to the desire of our hearts for union with infinite truth (what used to be called the saving of our souls).

(This post is based on a longer article from Columbia magazine, now available.)

GKC and modernity

Chesterton is often thought of as an amusing journalist and man of letters, a literary critic and novelist, but he was many other things besides – among them an artist, a poet, a playwright, a philosopher, and a theologian. Gilson praised him as a Thomist, while Ian Ker regards him as the worthy successor to Newman as Christian apologist. A new book called G.K. Chesterton, London, and Modernity presents him as a sophisticated commentator on the urban environment. His views on modernity and on reality itself have been widely quoted, and he is an influence on a surprisingly wide range of thinkers, such as Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, Antonio Gramsci, Rene Girard, S.R.L. Clark, Slavoj Zizek and John and Alison Milbank.

So what was his critique of modernity, and what was the alternative he proposed?

First, here is a passage that will evoke a snort from Neoconservatives. “It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt it might have been Communism, if

Why Chesterton?

G.K.C.

Part of my recent interview with Maica Rivera concerned the G.K. Chesterton Library, which used to be looked after by the Centre for Faith & Culture. The following is slightly edited.

Q: What is the most important book/collection in the Chesterton Library at the Center for Faith & Culture in Oxford?

A: The Chesterton Library is no longer a part of the Center for Faith & Culture. It is owned by an independent charitable trust and located at the Oxford Oratory. The details are online here. Among the important books in the collection are many first editions, also many books inscribed by Chesterton himself (not just with signatures, but with drawings and comments).

Q: What is your favourite Chesterton book? Why?

A: It is hard to name a favourite, but perhaps I should say The Catholic Church and Conversion, because it reflects so accurately my own experience of becoming a Catholic. Or Orthodoxy, which is also about conversion, but contains a much more detailed argument and many famous passages. That is undoubtedly one of the greatest books of the 20th century.

Q: How can Chesterton's books impact our lives in the 21st century?

A: Chesterton understood many of the problems that afflict our culture, for example consumerism and the loss of a sense of meaning in modern life. He wrote: “People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.” He wrote perceptively about these problems of modernity, and his arguments and insights are completely relevant to us now. He was a great influence on Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, and Jorge Luis Borges. Pope Francis seems to be a fan. And new books about Chesterton continue to appear. For example, Chesterton, London and Modernity. Also, an book called Chesterton and the Jews by Ann Farmer will appear later this year, based on important new research. Ann has an article on her site that will give you an idea of what she says.

Q: Can a non-Catholic reader really enjoy and understand Chesterton´s work?

A: Certainly! He wrote for everyone, and many of his friends were non-Christians or even anti-Christians – witness his debates with George Bernard Shaw. He loved argument, and he wrote in a way that anyone can understand. He did not assume that his readers were Christian.

For further information and links visit the G.K. Chesterton Library site.

The Centre for Faith & Culture

The Centre is above the art gallery in King Street, Oxford.

I was recently asked by Maica Rivera from Madrid (CEU San Pablo) to give a brief email interview about the Centre and what we have been trying to do in Oxford over the last twenty years. The year 2014 marks the 20th anniversary of our founding, so it seems like a good moment to look back. 

Q: What can you explain to Spanish Chesterton readers about the Centre for Faith & Culture in Oxford?

A (Stratford): My wife and I founded it in 1994 as a partnership between Westminster College (later absorbed into Oxford Brookes University) and the Edinburgh publisher T&T Clark (later absorbed by Continuum). It was a research centre, its work being the organisation of conferences and the publication of books. Our aim was to explore the meaning of evangelization, and to understand the relationship between faith and culture. We were both

Desolation of Smaug

Here is an interview I did for a Spanish conference on Lewis and Tolkien scheduled for 2014.

Q: How can your book The Power of the Ring help us to prepare for our cinema experience with the forthcoming film The Hobbit II: The Desolation of Smaug?

A (Stratford): Obviously the film can be enjoyed simply as an adventure or action movie, with lots of fighting, magic, monsters, and heroic deeds. In that sense it is not essential to read about the film or the book before going to the cinema. But my book is designed to explore the deeper meanings of the story and the intentions of J.R.R. Tolkien in writing it. These meanings and intentions add another layer of interest and enjoyment to the story. Unless you know them you will miss some of the pleasure you might have had in viewing the film.

My book aims to explain why Tolkien’s “Middle-earth” – the imaginary world in which the story is set – is relevant to us today. Tolkien created Middle-earth out of real-life places and experiences. His vivid descriptions of nature, which inspired Peter Jackson to design the world of the movie, draw on real life but help us to look at the world in a new way, with a keener appreciation of its beautiful qualities and a stronger love of nature. In the 1960s Tolkien’s writing even helped to inspire the ecology movement.

But there are many other ways in which Middle-earth throws light on the real world. For example, Tolkien was very concerned with the crisis in modernity caused by the development of technology and our over-reliance on it. The “Ring” and dark magic in general represents all the various types of machinery with which we try to control the world – often polluting it in the process – and force others to do our will. Most importantly of all, the tale of the Hobbit is about the transformation of a personality. Bilbo represents “Everyman” – that is to say, you and me – in a journey from a rather boring complacency to a much higher state of being, a state that Tolkien himself refers to as “nobility of spirit”. By this he means the possibility of heroism, a preparedness to sacrifice oneself and one’s own gain for the sake of others, as Bilbo is willing to do by the end of the story.

A fairy tale, like The Hobbit, as Tolkien well knew, is more than an entertainment. It contains a moral lesson – or many such lessons. G.K. Chesterton once said that "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten" (Orthodoxy, 1908). In the same way, the various dangers that the Hobbit and the Dwarves meet along the way to the Lonely Mountain, including the Orcs of the mountains and the giant spiders of Mirkwood,

The four rivers of meaning (2)

I have been writing about the four meanings of Scripture, a traditional doctrine revived in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (115-118): "According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church" (115).

We must start with the historical or literal meaning (the plain sense of the words, as they were evidently intended to be understood, taking into account the genre and context in which they were written), and then move on via an understanding of “typology” to the doctrinal message the words and events convey about Christ, who is the centre of Revelation. We then draw