Paul Nowak, author of the new "Uncle Chestnut" book

Paul Nowak, author of the recently published The Inconvenient Adventures of Uncle Chestnut, sent this note:

I've been meaning to let you guys @ Chesterton and Friends know a couple things:

1) A while ago you mentioned Neil Gaiman using GKC in Sandman - I got a small scan of a few panels here:
http://eternal-revolution.com/573/chesterton/gk-chesterton-comic-hero/

2) I've not managed to post about this myself, but Simpsons artist Luis Escobar did a cartoon of GKC/Uncle Chestnut on his blog: http://www.luisescobarblog.com/?p=334

The Gaiman/Sandman posts referred to are GK Comics in 2005 and GK and the Sandman in 2006. Aeons ago on a blog timeline. How wonderful that these bubbles can rise to the surface when someone gets the hankering to google.

"Uncle Chestnut" received a thumbs up from my 11 year old son. I greatly enjoyed it myself, and will post a review shortly.

Thanks for your good work, Paul!

Coming Soon: new edition of "The Coloured Lands"

This is very good news! A new edition of The Coloured Lands will be released this March by Dover Publications. The book by G.K. Chesterton was originally published posthumously in 1938, and I think it has been out of print since that time. So if you already have one, as I do, you probably keep it in that special bookcase that the younger members of your household are not allowed browse without permission; this in hope of keeping babies from tearing pages, and to keep chocolate milk from spoiling it. But these Fairy Stories, Comic Verse and Fantastic Pictures are a fun introduction to GKC for young readers. My 11 year old enjoyed reading his first Chesterton stories that Nancy C. Brown edited and republished two winters ago, The Father Brown Reader: Stories from Chesterton. Since then he's searched for more Chesterton on his level and poked through a bit of Collected Works Vol 14: Short Stories, Fairy Tales and Mystery Stories. I think he'll be getting this new edition of The Coloured Lands for his 12th birthday.

Collected Works voIs 29-34 (ILN articles)

available right now for $5 per book as part of an Ignatius Press sale!

h/t to Marcel @ Mary's Aggies, a lucid writer and engaging speaker

The Man Who Was Thursday: Free at ChristianAudio.com during April 2008

Free Audiobook of the Month

All that G. K. Chesterton's critics and comrades labeled him - devotional, impious, confounding, intelligent, humorous, bombastic - he wove into The Man Who Was Thursday. This page-turner sends characters bobbing around a delightfully confusing plot of mythic proportions. There are so many twists and turns that soon you'll be tangled in a story that you cannot put down...even if you're not entirely sure why!

Simply add the Download format to your cart and use the coupon code APR2008 during checkout to receive your free download of The Man Who Was Thursday.

Free Audiobook of the Month

--

Anger Online

Matthew Anger, editor of the recently published Belloc anthology The Eyewitness, has been blogging for a year and a half at Glendalough: Books, Philosophy and Culture.



--

The Vocation of Business

John Médaille, author of The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace, sent this announcement along. I had bookmarked it on Amazon.com when it was not yet released, but now that it is available I don't at the moment have the time to read it (I just bought a 3-vol 1900 edition of Life of Johnson, among a dozen other gems). If any reader of this blog picks up Médaille's book, then please write a short review, send it along, and we'll post it here if you like.

New Book on Distributism:
I am proud to announce the publication of my book, The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace, by Continuum International.

The overriding theme of this book is that the original unity of distributive and corrective justice that prevailed in both economics and moral discourse until the 16th and seventeenth centuries was shattered by the rise of an individualistic capitalism that relied on corrective justice (justice in exchange) alone. But an economics that lacks a distributive principle will attain neither equity nor equilibrium and will be inherently unstable and increasingly reliant on both government power (Keynesianism) and consumer credit (usury) to correct the imbalances. Catholic social teaching, by contrast, emphasis a greater equity in the distribution of land and other means of production, and the just wage, and thereby leads more naturally to economic equilibrium and social justice. Finally, the book shows many examples of functioning systems, both large scale and small, that operate on the principles taught by the Church and produce a high degree of both equity and equilibrium.

I am also proud to have two very nice "blurbs."

‘In this remarkable book John Médaille succeeds in showing how the more radical elements in Catholic Social teaching can be turned into really practical projects for building an alternative to capitalism. He shows that the key is to alter the culture of the business and the corporation in order to ensure that political and economic purposes, distributive and corrective justice become once again integrated, as classical philosophy and Christian theology alike demand. *The Vocation of business* supplies us at last with some keys for the turning of Christian critique of liberalism into a new from of effective practice.’

John Milbank University of Nottingham

"John Médaille has produced a tour de force - a book that manages to give the reader just enough insight into the various thinkers and subjects treated without overloading the reader and without missing anything important out. The careful yet unequivocal judgement on neoconservatism and the chapter on Distributism are particularly good."

Helen Alford OP, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Angelicum