This December - on Friday, Dec. 21st at 7:00 PM at Ivy Hall - join us as we discuss one of Chesterton's favorite writers and his classic Christmas tales: we will be discussing Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth. 

You can find both books online at Project Gutenberg: click here for A Christmas Carol and click here for The Cricket on the Hearth. You can access another, slightly more readable version of A Christmas Carol here as well.

Also, as promised at the November meeting, I'm including a link to a paper I wrote on Dickens' Christmas works: click here to download. Please note: I recommend you read the books before reading the paper, if you are interested in the paper. It depends on the content of the works.

See below to RSVP. We hope you'll join us in December for this great discussion of a wonderful seasonal classic and its lesser-known companion work!

For the Society's next meeting, on July 15, members will be treated to a preview version of the talk that Joe Grabowski will be giving at The 37th Annual Chesterton Conference in Orlando, Florida (Aug. 2-4).

The lecture will be on Chesterton and the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and try to show how Chesterton studies can benefit from contact with Kierkegaard scholarship in terms of understanding Chesterton's place in the history of philosophy and how Chesterton's worldview - especially as expressed in "The Ethics of Elfland," the fourth chapter in Orthodoxy - can genuinely be seen as a true system and as a truly innovative and important response to foregoing intellectual movements.

As the lecture is intended for a general audience, no background familiarity with Kierkegaard will be assumed or necessary; however, if members are interested, a great resource for getting an overview of Kierkegaard's thought is the entry on him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Society will gather as usual at 6:30 PM on July 15th for some snacks and socialization, and the lecture will commence at 7:00 PM, with time for questions and socialization to follow. Please RSVP for this meeting below.

For the Society's next meeting, on March 18th, we will be reading Chesterton's marvelous biography of "the dumb ox," St. Thomas Aquinas.  RSVP for this meeting at the bottom of this post.

You can purchase the book here from the American Chesterton Society.

Since March 18th is also the vigil of the Solemnity of Saint Joseph in the Roman Catholic Church, we are going to participate in a venerable old St. Joseph's Day tradition: The Saint Joseph Table - or, well, our version of it anyway. Click "read more" to see more info about that.

Earlier this month, several Southeastern PA Chestertonians headed out to the Seminary of Our Lady of the Lake in Mundelein, IL for the 33rd Annual Chesterton Conference. The campus was beautiful and the people were - as could be expected - wonderful!

The keynote speaker for the event was His Excellency, the Most Reverend Thomas J. Paprocki, Bishop of Springfield in Illinois. Other speakers included Dale Ahlquist, Joseph Pearce, Father Robert Wild, Nancy Carpentier Brown, Scott Richert, and many others! 

Of course, also much enjoyed were the meals where new friends were made, and the (in)famous afterglow gatherings!

Below the jump are some other pictures from what was truly an edifying and enjoyable event. If you have never been to one of these conferences, you might want to plan on it for next year!