This month we will be starting a new book for our discussions, having completed The Napoleon of Notting Hill. We will be meeting at St. Stephen Parish after the 6:00 PM Mass on Tuesday, March 11 in classroom 2, as usual.

This month we will start reading The Outline of Sanity and our long delayed reading and discussion of Distributism (or Distributivism, as some would have it) or Localism, to give it a friendlier and more telling name.

To start off, here is a link to the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Chesterton University Lecture 47: The Outline of Sanity which is a good introduction to the book and some of the ideas of Distributism/Localism.

There are copies of The Outline of Sanity for sale in the St. Stephen’s Bookstore, if you don’t have a copy and want to get one. I couldn’t find an online eBook. All I could find online was a PDF of a typewritten copy that had some yellow highlighting on several pages. I have used that and broken it up into what will be our monthly readings, and will send them out with my email each month.

This month we will read and discuss:

The Outline of Sanity, Book I, Some General Ideas
1. The Beginning of the Quarrel
2. The Peril of the Hour
3. The Chance of Recovery
4. On a Sense of Proportion
A PDF of the readings is attached to this email.

I am looking forward to these readings on Distributism. It’s a topic lots of people seem to be very curious about, but many know nothing about (or at least not much). And interestingly, it was noted over the past few months in our discussions of The Napoleon of Notting Hill that Chesterton had made quite an argument for Distributism even in that novel.