To anyone familiar with Tolkien and Lewis's sensibilities, that's hardly surprising.

Indeed, it would be impossible to imagine Tolkien — who famously disliked Lewis's own Narnia stories, a sentiment contrasting greatly with Lewis' enormous esteem for Tolkien's Middle-earth — being anything but appalled by Disney's silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.

Nor is it particularly surprising that Lewis similarly derided Disney's dwarves as "vulgar" (though he appreciated other aspects of the film).

In the words of a Tolkien scholar quoted in the Atlas Obscura post, "I think it grated on them that he was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct."

(Aside: That post starts with the incredibly ignorant claim, propounded with astonishingly misplaced confidence, that "It's no secret that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were legendary frenemies.")

Thinking about this recently, though, it occurred to me that a contemporary and peer of Lewis and Tolkien's, though not of their circle, would likely have had a very different view, had he lived a few years longer: G.K. Chesterton (who died in 1936, two years before Snow White was released).

Unlike Tolkien and Lewis — Oxbridge dons and literary elites — Chesterton was a populist who attended but did not graduate from public university (University College London), and whose work was entirely popular in nature.

Chesterton was a great defender of popular and even "vulgar" culture — the very change leveled by Lewis and Tolkien against Snow White. Take the following utterly typically Chestertonian sentiment, from All Things Considered:

I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. Continue reading

• Deacon Steven D. Greydanus is film critic for the National Catholic Register, creator of Decent Films, and a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of Newark.

It discusses the great GKC's particular qualification for this singular honour: his optimism - "no facile cheeriness but a deep conviction that the world was fundamentally good".

This is a significant attribute.

St Teresa of Avila asked God to preserve her "from sad-faced saints" and you only have to look about you to see that there is a lot of gloom and doom about these days to cause existential anxiety and pessimism.

Sometimes I think that Pope Francis has the only cheerful face in the Vatican.

Under-population has overtaken over-population as a future nightmare scenario, alongside the ever-present fears over climate change; there is the power and confidence of Islam compared with the western collapse of Christian belief; the unerring capacity of the new computer technology to tempt us into moral turpitude and so on.

Chesterton would have understood all this - and indeed he predicted some of the factors that have brought about the moral chaos of the western world.

But, as Howse infers, his almost mystical insight into the power of divine love to transform the world saved him from the temptation of gloom.

I learnt from Howse that Chesterton took the name of Francis of Assisi as his confirmation saint, recognising "an ascetic who fasted and did penance not because he hated the world, but because he loved it."

Chesterton was a genius - not itself a requirement of sanctity - a prophet and a great-hearted, large-spirited man.

As William Oddie, GKC's biographer has mentioned in a recent blog, the Bishop of Northampton, the Right Reverend Peter Doyle, in whose diocese Chesterton lived and died, is agreeable for someone to start the process of the writer's cause for canonisation.

Howse reflects that there might be an impediment here: "One cannot help thinking that Chesterton's reliance on his wife had an element of self-infantilisation that was unfair on her...Again, this should not debar Chesterton from heaven. But though saints have their faults - which are not to be imitated - canonising Chesterton would risk his faults being imitated by mistake."

My response to this is to say that Chesterton is inimitable. No-one is going to copy his married life. Continue reading

Image: St Peter's List

The original G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries, were about a mild-mannered priest who solves crimes because he understands man's sinful nature.

Chesterton used the stories as a vehicle to comment on society.

The first of present series uses mostly newly written material, but Mark Williams, as Brown, takes no liberties with the character, who is understatedly quizzical and likeable.

Of course, there are some difficulties in transitioning Chesterton's famous priest-detective from the page to the small screen. As Michael Newton noted a day after the series began on the BBC, Chesterton's protagonist is so humble a character, so unconcerned about his own self, that it's hard to make a show that focuses directly on him

The present series has had to make certain changes in order to "work" for television. Father Brown makes a more direct transition to the centre of the stories. Moreover, the tales are reconfigured to take place in one small English village in the 1950′s. As a result, the great French detective Valentine (Chesterton's initial foil) becomes an English detective, rather than a world-renowned investigator. But then, such changes are to be expected: all translation is by necessity interpretation and re-creation.

After all, as starring actor (and self-described "pantheistic humanist") Mark Williams himself explains, Father Brown is not simply another television detective:

[Father Brown] has a huge appetite for the detail of life and for humanity, and he cares very much about people's souls. That's the most interesting thing about him as a sleuth: it's not him solving a conundrum or a crossword, he's dealing with what he sees as people's eternal damnation. And when he works it out, the sky turns black and is full of harpies; he's desperately committed to his morality.

Fr Brown screens on UKTV on Sunday nightys at 10:oopm

Source

• Gene Veith Pathos.com
• Dom Post
• Image: UKTV

But any Christian who does apologetics must think about comparative religions because the most popular of all objections against the claims of Christianity today comes from this field. The objection is not that Christianity is not true but that it is not the truth; not that it is a false religion but that it is only a religion. The world is a big place, the objector reasons; "different strokes for different folks". How insufferably narrow-minded to claim that Christianity is the one true religion! God just has to be more open-minded than that.

This is the single most common objection to the Faith today, for "today" worships not God but equality. It fears being right where others are wrong more than it fears being wrong. It worships democracy and resents the fact that God is an absolute monarch. It has changed the meaning of the word honor from being respected because you are superior in some way to being accepted because you are not superior in any way but just like us. The one unanswerable insult, the absolutely worst name you can possibly call a person in today's society, is "fanatic", especially "religious fanatic". If you confess at a fashionable cocktail party that you are plotting to overthrow the government, or that you are a PLO terrorist or a KGB spy, or that you molest porcupines or bite bats' heads off, you will soon attract a buzzing, fascinated, sympathetic circle of listeners. But if you confess that you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, you will find yourself suddenly alone, with a distinct chill in the air.

Here are twelve of the commonest forms of this objection, the odium of elitism, with answers to each. Continue reading

Sources

• The Integrated Catholic Life
• Image: Christianity vs Catholicism