Chesterton makes this into a defence of tradition and of a backward-looking approach that involves "giving votes to the most obscure of classes: our ancestors", and to some extent refuses to submit to present-day values. That Axess Magazine devotes an edition to death appears, at least in the Chestertonian sense, logical given the siding with tradition that has been a thread running through my six-year chief-editorship that ends with this edition. It is my firm view that tolerance and open sensuality is seriously stimulated and tested in confrontations with thinking of the past. There may, of course, seem to be a paradox embedded in the fact that it is only with understanding and empathy of the conditions and thought patterns of earlier times that we are tested in our acceptance of the fundamentally different and alien.

Unfortunately, developments in this regard seem ominous. The obsession with the present and its values ??is reflecte...