Finding the Ethics in His Elfland

The Matthew's House Project appears to be a fairly new place on the internet. Its stated purpose is "to develop a place in which the intersections of faith and culture can be explored." Director Zachry O. Kincaid is fond of G.K. Chesterton, and he references GKC in several of his Project writings thus far. His June article is titled The Narrative World of G.K. Chesterton: Finding the Ethics in His Elfland and begins with:

The purpose of this work is to analyze G. K. Chesterton’s fiction by coming to his fiction writing with a particular set of principles: boundary, miracle, and adventure. While these are my terms, they represent a categorization in keeping with “Ethics of Elfland,” in Orthodoxy, his primary defense of Christian theology as opposed to modernism.

These categories are significant because they provide the reader with terms to analyze Chesterton’s narrative work as a defense of Christian theology. In his work, boundary is legitimate when it includes the supernatural, miracle, when it recognizes the limitations of reason, and adventure, when it involves a renewed sense about the world. Once you understand how Chesterton uses boundary, miracle, and adventure, you become more aware of how these principles function outside the narrative world of Chesterton, in everyday life.