Joseph Pearce and I flew from Greenville to Minneapolis yesterday to take part in the annual Chesterton Conference at University of St Thomas. This shindig gets bigger each year. Organizer, Dale Ahlquist reckons there will be over 600 people attending from all over the world.
Last night those of us who are speakers got together at Dale’s home for a steak dinner–one of the conference traditions. It was good to see William Oddie again. William is a former Anglican priest, a journalist, former editor of London’s Catholic Herald and has a new book on Chesterton coming out this year. I used to write regularly for William when I lived in England, so it was great to see an old friend again.
One of the things William is famous for is promoting the idea that there should be a cause for canonization started for Chesterton. William (who is not a small person) proclaimed with Chestertonian rumbustiousness that we ‘need more fat saints.’
More from the conference later.
PS: I tried to post an excerpt from my address to the conference here, but when I cut and pasted from my document it went into a box at the bottom of the blogger page rather than in the blogger post composition window. If any of you techies out there can tell me how to cut and paste into a blog post, I’ll try again.
Now I’m curious. How many portly saints do we have? Offhand, I can think of Aquinas and Bl. John XXIII.
Regarding your blogger frustrations:For some reason blogger does weird stuff with copy/pasting. It happens about 90% of the time for me. The easiest option would be to click on the “Edit HTML” button above your post. Any formatting could be lost, so you might end up having to redo paragraph breaks, italics, whatever.Good luck!And I agree. We could use some more fat saints. 😀
I just read The Dumb Ox and was pondering buying a statue or prayer card of Aquinas. But I can’t really find one that looks like the figure decsribed by Chesterton. They all seem to look like feminine and fairly thin men, just like most of the rest of the saint statues. Indeed, I found myself asking – why are all the saints thin and somewhat effeminate looking men? Why no fat ones, or for that matter, super-muscular ones? Myself, I have always suspected that Joseph was actually quite the B*d *ss, what with his whole cerebus to the infant lord vocation and what not.
We saw Dr Oddie last night on journey Home. He was fascinating. It must have been a great conference.God bless
I cannot wait to attend next year in Seattle.