Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Chesterton Society Meeting

February 16, 2016 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

We will be discussing the first chapter of The Everlasting Man. “The Man in the Cave” In this chapter GKC criticizes the evolutionists for their faulty reasoning, leaps of logic, non-sequitors and plain old wishful thinking. In his unique way he urges us to rid our minds of all the grids and filters and lenses contemporary education and popular “science” encourage (you might say brainwash) us to view the world through. The result is a distorted vision that ignores certain things and, on the other hand, sees things that aren’t really there. As, it seems, the religion of evolution is unfortunately always with us, this first chapter offers us a timely and refreshing vision of what it is we really know – and don’t know – about early man.

The Fr. Brown story for this month is The Chief Mourner of Marne. This is the second to last story of The Secret of Father Brown. These stories, if you remember, are tied together by the first and last chapters, the Secret of Father Brown and The Secret of Flambeau, respectively. It all started with a visit of Father Brown to the estate of Flambeau, and his irritation from the prodding of Flambeau’s guest, a Mr. Chace. The stories are examples of Father Brown’s “method” of detection.

We will meet at the usual time, at the usual place. And if you don’t know where and when that is, for a nominal fee I will give you the information you need to join us on Tuesday, February 16.

I’ll close with a passage from The Secret of Father Brown that is also pertinent to our current chapter of The Everlasting Man.

Yours,

Spencer

Father Brown snapped his fingers with the same animated annoyance. “That’s it,” he cried; “that’s just where we part company. Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect: in what they would call a dry impartial light, in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his ‘criminal skull’ as if it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros’s nose. When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don’t deny the dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it’s the very reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it’s actually suppression of what we know. It’s treating a friend as a stranger, and pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It’s like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours. Well, what you call ‘the secret’ is exactly the opposite. I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. . . . Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer.”

Details

Date:
February 16, 2016
Time:
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
close window

Mass Times & Directions

Weekend Masses

Saturday: 7:00 am, 9:00 am

Sunday High Mass: 10:30 am

Sunday Low Mass: 8:30 am, 1:00 pm

Weekday Masses

Monday and Wednesday: 7:00 am, 12:15 pm

Tuesday and Thursday: 7:00 am, 6:30 pm

Friday: 7:00 am, 12:00 pm, 6:30 pm

Please check our bulletin for more information.

5461 44th Street
Sacramento, CA 95820
(916) 455-5114