Implicit and Explicit Reason - Dr. Dale Ahlquist

Dale Ahlquist is President of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, creator and host of the EWTN series “G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense,” and Publisher of Gilbert Magazine. He is the author of six books, and has edited fourteen. His most recent work, with the Society of G.K. Chesterton, is Orthodoxy: An American Translation. An interview about the work can be found at https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/chestertons-orthodoxy-a-new-translation-helps-to-better-understand-a-classic/.He is a Senior Fellow of the Chesterton Library at London, and has been called “probably the greatest living authority on the life and work of G.K. Chesterton.”Dr. Ahlquist has given more than 900 lectures at universities, conferences, and other institutions, including Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Notre Dame, Oxford, the Vatican Forum in Rome, and the House of Lords in London.He is also the co-founder of Chesterton Academy, a top-rated Catholic classical high school in Hopkins, Minnesota, which is the flagship of the growing Chesterton Schools Network, which includes nearly 60 high schools in the U.S., Canada, Italy, Iraq, and Sierra Leone.In this episode, Dr. Ahlquist reflects on one of Newman’s University Sermons, “Implicit and Explicit Reason”. He finds that Newman, like Chesterton (the two great English converts of their respective centuries),  makes you go deep; makes you think before offering a conclusion. Chesterton has said that Newman has a dangerous patience - a menacing air of leisure, laying out his themes methodically, piece by piece. Each sentence is patiently written wrote Chesterton; “His logic is like music”. Both Chesterton and Newman are comfortable with logic and the tools that defend the faith. They generously share the fullness of wisdom. Dr. Ahlquist shares that Chesterton’s arguments are indeed influenced by Newman. For example in this sermon St. Peter puts faith and reason together, countering the world’s effort to put them at war with each other.  Here Newman advises us to always be ready to use reason to defend the faith – give a reasonable account. Reason in its proper place is an aid to faith. Chesterton in his great apologetic of the faith, Orthodoxy writes, “reason itself is a matter of faith – it’s an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality itself”.   To approach Newman's majestic thought it is highly recommended to download the formatted sermon at www.newmanontap.com. Comments and suggestions are appreciated on the same site.