What on a break point, daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth

for the Colson Center on John Stone Street.

In his 1929 book The Thing, G.K. Chesterton warned social reformers to be cautious about

changing institutions' laws or customs.

Quote, let us say for the sake of simplicity, offense, or a gait is erected across a road.

The more modern type of reformer goes galley up to it and says, I don't see the use of

this, let's clear it away.

To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer, well if you don't

see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away.

Now Chesterton was illustrating here the often subtle importance of things that modern seems

so eager to deconstruct and tear down.

Before setting aside long-standing traditions we should first understand them.

Why previous generations were committed to them.

Otherwise even our most well-meaning reforms can incur serious consequences, not all of

which are immediately obvious to us, but which will fall on future generations.

Chesterton's analogy recently came to mind when I was reading an essay by Louise Perry

at the Spectator.

It was entitled, Modernity is making you sterile.

Perry is a maverick feminist and the author of a book called The Case Against the Sexual

Revolution.

She argues that the so-called progress narrative so cherished among the elites of the

developed world, along with those technologies that enable it, are keeping us from having

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