“Of all horrible religions,” G. K. Chesterton remarked in his book Orthodoxy, “the most horrible is the worship of the god within.” Chesterton (1874–1936) is full of such pungent, discomfiting accuracies. (Here’s another favorite, from the same book: “the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.”) For more than twenty-five years, the G. K. Chesterton Institute has been publishing The Chesterton Review, a quarterly devoted to exploring Chesterton’s themes and thought. It is an eminently worthy enterprise. Chesterton’s famous penchant for paradox, his impatience with cant, his pugnacious endorsement of unfashionable opinions—all this makes him a worthy ally in the effort to understand and critique the sillinesses of contemporary cu ...

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