Beer and Holiness (Part II)

Beer and Holiness Converge in the Life of This Young Entrepreneur

A Profile of Luis Gordon

This is the second part of a post that began here.

A successful entrepreneur by his late 20s, Luis paid himself a high but not outrageous salary, enjoyed wearing good clothes, drove a flashy, yellow car and was actively engaged in politics promoting his view of the world in the rough and tumble politics of Spain in the late ‘20s.

The Gordon’s had been Catholic all the way back to Scotland which most likely contributed to Arthur’s decision to move to Spain 200 years earlier. Luis himself was a devout Catholic with an authentic piety. His reputation at home was "A treasure of a man… serious and formal, yet friendly and affectionate…Everyone in the family regarded him as a saint."

Floyd Dell on G. K. Chesteron, Part 2

A month ago, I posted the first part of Floyd Dell's review of G. K. Chesterton's "A Short History of England."  Here's the rest:

The philosophy of Christianity is generally – save in the Calvinistic sects – a free-will philosophy.  A good Christian wants to believe in miracles.  And a good Christian who happens to be a revolutionist wants to live in a world where the miracle of revolution is possible – where the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  Not for him the cut-and-dried universe of Marxian determinism!  And not for some millions of other excellent people who, I am sure, would gladly take their places behind the first barricade of the Revolution.  Professor Milyukov, it is said, sat in a balcony and watched the Petrograd mob go against the machine-guns.  “It will all be over in half an hour,” he said.  He knew too much to believe that a mob could suddenly overthrow the solid tyranny of Tsarism.  But the mob didn’t know.  And so it went and did it.  Since then we have learned that success of the Russian revolution was, for a lot of reasons, inevitable, predestined, economically determined.  But for about twenty-four hours what was needed was Christian courage and the faith that is beyond knowledge.

Floyd Dell by John Sloane (1914)

It is characteristic of this mode of thought, however, that it does not wait for the Revolution, but rather continually creates revolutionary forms of action, some hopeless and some fruitful, out of its ever-youthful energies.

 [Mr. Chesterton champions] the movement for the creation or restoration of small peasant holdings of land [and] Guild Socialism intending to restore to labor the chief of its medieval virtues, the ancient virtue of handicraftsmanship. It will be noted that the mind which is free from the obsession of the Present is free to conceive a restoration of the Past.  To the determinist there is something at once sacrilegious and wasteful in this attempt, which he describes as “setting back the clock.” To the free-willist, however, this is no clockwork universe.  Going back to the path from which we wandered a few hundred years ago may be the most progressive thing to do – particularly if we have wandered into a bog.