Mental Pictures: Shapes and Colors in the Thought of G.K. Chesterton

Although Chesterton is not what would normally be considered a systematic thinker, his writings exhibit a marked consistency of thought by means of a series of recurrent images. In order to understand how Chesterton thinks, therefore, it is best to follow these series of images. An examination of the contrasting images he uses to critique as modes of madness both Impressionism in The Man Who Was Thursday and Rationalism in The Flying Inn will demonstrate the validity of this approach to Chesterton. A brief conclusion will argue that epistemological sanity for Chesterton entails three crucial elements: externality, commonality and Christian orthodoxy

Academic Paper Session IV-B

Mental Pictures: Shapes and Colors in the Thought of G.K. Chesterton - William L. Isley, Jr. Although Chesterton is not what would normally be considered a systematic thinker, his writings exhibit a marked consistency of thought by means of a series of recurrent images. In order to understand how Chesterton thinks, therefore, it is best to follow these series of images. An examination of the contrasting images he uses to critique as modes of madness both Impressionism in The Man Who Was Thursday and Rationalism in The Flying Inn will demonstrate the validity of this approach to Chesterton. A brief conclusion will argue that epistemological sanity for Chesterton entails three crucial elements: externality, commonality and Christian orthodoxy. Romance and the Pocket Pistol: The Armed Poet in the Fiction of G.K. Chesterton - Jessica Dooley “But the more [Syme] felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him – the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol – took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed. The swordstick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of this own more healthy romance.” Chesterton’s poet-protagonists bear arms as a matter of course, and take up the pocket pistol as readily as the pen. Why is that? What is the romance of the pocket pistol? In The Man Who Was Thursday, both the poet Syme and the anarchist Gregory were able to perceive the real and practical consequences of ideas. The policeman and the anarchist alike knew that anarchy was not an intangible creed, but an imminent and practical plan of attack. Though dismissed in Saffron Park, anarchy was real, so real that Syme could duel it – and he did. The romance of the pocket pistol is that the poet, who knows the value of life, also knows that there is something worth dying for. Syme “felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things” (TMWWT, Chapter X) before his duel with the Marquis, who embodied in a single opponent all the horror of the conscienceless, implacable purpose of anarchy. But the very diabolical impossibility of the fact that the Marquis was impervious to injury filled Syme with a renewed sense of reality. “After all,” he said to himself, “I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do – I can die” (TMWWT, Chapter X). In the glow of his “chivalric folly,” Syme knew the power and the horror of anarchy, its unthinkable intentions, and incredible imminence. That is why the pocket pistol takes on such chivalric significance; it has become a tool, not to kill a man, but to combat an idea. The romance of the pocket pistol is that an idea may become a man

Session 2-A: Human Relationships in the Work of C.S. Lewis

You Will Have No More Dreams - Have Children Instead: Or, What\u27s a Nice Egalitarian Girl Like You Doing in a Book Like This? - Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait This paper attempts to reconcile feminism with Lewis’ hierarchical view of marriage and gender roles in That Hideous Strength. I neither celebrate hierarchy as the Biblical model, nor excuse Lewis on the grounds that marriage to Joy saved him from sexism. Instead, I argue that Lewis’ view of obedience is a fluid and courtly one which the company at St. Anne’s exemplifies in complicated ways; that Mark as well as Jane Studdock needs to learn obedience and humility in order to save their marriage; that Jane’s true sin is not feminism, but a desire not to be “interfered with” by obligations to others; and that her conversion is meant as a model for seekers of both sexes, and is in fact modeled on Lewis’ own. C.S. Lewis on Friendship - William L. Isley, Jr. This paper will consider C.S. Lewis’s exposition of love as friendship, in particular his chapter on friendship in The Four Loves. After a brief review of his concept of friendship as one of the four kinds of love and its context within the history of Western views on friendship, two features of the essay will be more closely analyzed. These are: The legitimacy of limiting the definition of friendship to a shared interest. Lewis’s hesitancy to use friendship as a model for the relationship between God and man. The paper will conclude with a brief comparison of Lewis’s understanding of friendship with the biblical views, especially those of Proverbs and the Gospel of John, and a proposal for friendship as a model for Christian spirituality. Moderator: Robert Moore-Jumonvill

Waking up from the DREAM of preventing diabetes with drugs

The current epidemic of diabetes makes a drug to prevent it attractive. But despite promotion of recent research evidence, Victor Montori, William Isley, and Gordon Guyatt argue that we are not there ye

Quantum Chemical Methods for Modeling Covalent Modification of Biological Thiols

Targeted covalent inhibitor drugs require computational methods that go beyond simple molecular‐mechanical force fields in order to model the chemical reactions that occur when they bind to their targets. Here, several semiempirical and density‐functional theory (DFT) methods are assessed for their ability to describe the potential energy surface and reaction energies of the covalent modification of a thiol by an electrophile. Functionals such as PBE and B3LYP fail to predict a stable enolate intermediate. This is largely due to delocalization error, which spuriously stabilizes the prereaction complex, in which excess electron density is transferred from the thiolate to the electrophile. Functionals with a high‐exact exchange component, range‐separated DFT functionals, and variationally optimized exact exchange (i.e., the LC‐B05minV functional) correct this issue to various degrees. The large gradient behavior of the exchange enhancement factor is also found to significantly affect the results, leading to the improved performance of PBE0. While ωB97X‐D and M06‐2X were reasonably accurate, no method provided quantitative accuracy for all three electrophiles, making this a very strenuous test of functional performance. Additionally, one drawback of M06‐2X was that molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using this functional were only stable if a fine integration grid was used. The low‐cost semiempirical methods, PM3, AM1, and PM7, provide a qualitatively correct description of the reaction mechanism, although the energetics is not quantitatively reliable. As a proof of concept, the potential of mean force for the addition of methylthiolate to methylvinyl ketone was calculated using quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical MD in an explicit polarizable aqueous solvent