What’s Wrong With the World (Annotated)

Chesterton says there are four things wrong with the world:

Big Government, Big Business, Feminism, and Public Education.

To remind you: he wrote this in 1910.

What these four familiar things all have in common is that they undermine the family, the basic unit of society.

What’s wrong with the world, however, is not G.K. Chesterton. He is one of the things that is right. He continues to be right long after his death in 1936, as his words live on and ring true, especially in the case of this book, which was written in 1910.

⏤ from the introduction by Dale Ahlquist, president of The Society of G.K. Chesterton

Annotated for the 21st Century

• 700+ footnotes explaining context and meaning
• Glossary for more difficult terms

＂It was here that I first read a volume of Chesterton’s essays. I had never heard of him and had no idea of what he stood for; nor can I quite understand why he made such an immediate conquest of me. It might have been expected that my pessimism, my atheism, and my hatred of sentiment would have made him to me the least congenial of all authors. ... Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.＂

⏤ C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Well known for his The Everlasting Man, Orthodoxy, and the Father Brown mystery stories, among other works, he was a preeminent thinker and apologist for the Christian worldview. Born in London and growing to prominence at a time when the Western world was in upheaval, he developed into a cultural philosopher and literary critic like few others and remains one of the most quoted Christian authors of all time.