Orthodoxy

G.K. Chesterton was the finest contrarian of his generation, a man who could defend Christianity by first demolishing every intellectual fashion of his age. In Orthodoxy, he completes a project begun in Heretics: not merely to critique the fashionable philosophies of modernity, but to explain how he came to believe something definite and positive. The result is part intellectual autobiography, part philosophical warfare, and wholly delightful. Chesterton's method is the paradox: he argues that the madman is not the man who has lost his sanity, but the man who has lost everything except his reason. He contends that the Christian story is the only one that accounts for the full catastrophe of human experience, including the existence of evil, the hunger for meaning, and the desperate need for romance in a world grown gray. Over a century later, Orthodoxy endures because it refuses to let its readers rest comfortably in skepticism. It is for anyone who has ever suspected that modern agnosticism offers less than it promises, and who craves a thinker willing to wager everything on the adventure of belief.