More on the "Heretics" Conference

Nancy at Flying Stars has been posting some reports on the recent Chesterton Conference held by American Chesterton Society just over a week ago. One of the useful things I would like to note is that YOU can arrange to have some of the fun of that conference simply by ordering the audio tapes from the American Chesterton Society. (If you listen carefully, you may even hear the speakers during the few quiet periods when I was not laughing.) If you do order the tapes, you might also get yourself some beer (preferably home-brewed) or wine (preferably home-brewed) and some cheese (preferably Stilton!!!) - and enjoy yourself while you listen.

Some of the things you might want to know about:

We stay in a college dorm at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The hall is called "Grace Hall" - which was especially funny given that the conference was about heretics. There are two other buildings a few dozen feet away. One is the dining hall where all the meals except the banquet are held. The other has a large lobby and a good-size lecture hall, where all the talks are held. On the lawn between this and the dorm is an awful piece of rusty metal, which, however, is not the one called "Rusty Droppings" which was recently published in the magazsine (that one is located at XXX college, but I will give them no free advertising here!)

In the lobby, there are tables with wine and beer and cheese, and (at times) coffee, and even water. You know: "Feast on wine or fast on water, God almighty's son and daughter..." (GKC, The Flying Inn but I quote from memory)

There are also a number of used book stands (including the wonderful people from Loome!) Of course you can get any of the Chesterton stuff from the ACS (which you can see on their web page) - but I was happy to see that there was a new re-print of GKC's early poetry - which has some illustrations by himself. Also the first of the Father Brown volumes of the very important Collected Works (CW) from Ignatius Press (IP - in this context, we are NOT talking about the "Internet Protocol"... hee hee)

There were a LOT of people there. It was really great! A good number of young people, too (not that I am not young, but the years do creep up on one...) Towards the opposite side of the timeline, Frank and Ann (Stull) Petta were there; Frank has been to all of the conferences since they began some 25 years ago.

There is so much more, and perhaps I will be able to recall some of it before I... er... forget...