Defiant Joy

“The English should have instituted an annual Thanksgiving Day, to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left.” (pg 257 of Defiant Joy)
I think this illustrates the heart of what this book is about. In a day when people most often associate religion with a kill joy, they find an unlikely bedfellow in G.K. Chesterton. Here is a man who was deeply religious and for that very reason detested what most people detest about religion. However, G.K. Chesterton found a refuge of joy in Christianity, as he contemplated what was wrong with the prevailing pessimism inherent in the intellectual atheism that surrounded him in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He spent his life trying to spread that joy of life he found in Christianity, a joy that defied the pessimism of a world without “someone to thank,” through his many books and writings treated in this volume.
It was certainly not that G.K. Chesterton approached Christianity as if were sand for the head of an ostrich. He was thoroughly convinced that it was Christianity that made the rational sense, and not atheism. That Christianity gave him reason to enjoy life was icing on the cake, and enjoy the icing he did. Kevin Belmonte gives you little glimpses of this here and there throughout the book, introducing you to a wide variety of Chesterton’s literary output.
The book is good for that, it introduces you to a wide variety of Chesterton works. The author also brings out the wide influence Chesterton has had on other cultural figures and writers many of whom, like Ingmar Bergman, I would never have guessed. There is much emphasis put on his relationship with George Bernard Shaw.
However I must at least echo some of the other Amazon reviewers that were disappointed in the book. One would hope that a biography of Chesterton, if biography it was supposed to be, would have been written in a more lively and jovial fashion. The book fails to life up to the character of the man it is presenting. There is actually very little attention paid to his life, and relationships.
That said, there is much attention paid to his writing, what he wrote and why. In that it has served for me a bit of an introduction to Chesterton’s work. I have only previously read “Orthodoxy” and “The Dumb Ox.” The book perhaps will give an introduction to the man and steer the reader to read Chesterton in areas that he had not read them before. I think I will be picking up a copy of “The Man who was Thursday.” It is also filled with the wit of Chesterton in quotes, and those are always nice things to bandy about at a cocktail party, especially when you are in the company of theologians. Over all I enjoyed the book.