Master of Paradox

M arshall McLuhan’s first essay was titled “G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic.” McLuhan also wrote on Hopkins and Joyce (contrasting him with Aquinas) long before he published The Medium Is the Massage in 1967. He credited his conversion to Catholicism to discovering Chesterton while in graduate school at Cambridge, writing to his mother: “[H]ad I not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained agnostic.” How G.K.C. the journalist, controversialist and Catholic convert himself (in 1922) came to affect his century will be the subject of many books to come. In the meantime, we have Ian Ker’s masterful biography.

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