Uncommon Sense - The Official Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Society of G.K. Chesterton
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The Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, where we talk about everything under the sun with a Chestertonian perspective, as well as the writings and legacy of G.K. Chesterton himself. The podcast is hosted by Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski. Want to give us feedback? Email podcast@chesterton.org.

  1. 5h ago

    Chesterton is the Antidote to the Illness of our Age

    Somebody once wrote a fairy tale where the quest that wins the princess was to find a single newspaper that didn't contain an article by G.K. Chesterton. Dr. Susan Hanssen wrote her doctoral dissertation on him and now teaches history at the University of Dallas, and she argues he's the hinge of what Adam Schwartz called the third spring of English Catholicism. She ends the episode reading Lepanto aloud. In This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton reached readers the Catholic converts before him never could. John Henry Newman was an Oxford man writing for an educated elite, and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote poetry too esoteric for the common reader. Chesterton never went to university at all. The claim behind G.K. Chesterton's range: that he could start from any subject whatsoever, Victorian china shepherdesses included, and bring you back to a Christian understanding of the human person. Why nearly every movie preview is about the end of the world now, and how G.K. Chesterton was already correcting both Hegel's coming utopia and Oswald Spengler's inevitable decline. The essay in Heretics with the dull title that Dr. Hanssen calls the absolute cure for family troubles.  What "the English-speaking world" actually meant in 1910, and why an illustrated London paper could put G.K. Chesterton in front of Gandhi in Calcutta and an oil widow in Texas. Resources Mentioned: Dr. Hanssen's talk at this summer's Chesterton conference What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton Heretics by G.K. Chesterton Literary Converts by Joseph Pearce Chapters: 00:00: Introduction 00:30: Meeting Susan Hanssen, and a dissertation on Chesterton 02:53: The English-speaking world goes silent after the Reformation 07:35: Newman's second spring, and the third spring that followed 11:09: Belloc, the Latin south, and Chesterton as the Dickens of his age 14:30: High characters, middle characters, and the low characters Dickens let in 15:41: When the Mediterranean was the whole world, and then it wasn't 21:02: The illustrated papers, and writing for absolutely everyone 23:02: Three volumes that only list what he published 24:38: The fairy tale quest to find a paper without Chesterton in it 33:39: Chesterton the painter, and why his essays read like wet canvas 46:01: Lepanto, read aloud FOLLOW US Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT Donate Shop Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

    Chesterton is the Antidote to the Illness of our Age

  2. Sep 8

    G.K. Chesterton's Devotion to the Mother of God

    G.K. Chesterton spent his life writing about Our Lady, and the poems are still doing their work. Maria Romine, drama teacher at Chesterton Academy of St. Louis, traces her entry into the Catholic Church to a rosary handed to her in a gift shop, and her love of Chesterton to a poem about the Mother of God. On Our Lady's birthday, the conversation covers the Frances Chesterton Rosary League, saints on the high school stage, and Gilbert and Frances Chesterton as a model for married life. In this Episode: Chesterton's Marian poems, "A Little Litany" above all, did what no argument had: they sent one Presbyterian convert on a years-long search to understand how a man comes to write that way about the Mother of God. A Chesterton reading group in St. Louis began praying the rosary together, and within a few years an eager parent group had opened a Chesterton Academy there—a sequence the guest describes as the Holy Family finally getting its mother. Chesterton built a theater inside his own house and wrote plays for the neighborhood children; his play The Surprise dramatizes the idea that human makers work under God as subcreators. Memorizing a saint's words changes the actor who speaks them—the argument behind a Catholic high school's practice of building each year's production around a single saint. Freshmen learn two lines before they learn any steps: "May I have this dance" and "I would be delighted." Nobody can be rejected, so nobody has to be nervous. Resources: G.K. Chesterton and Our Lady, edited by Nancy Carpentier Brown, with an essay by Maria Romine The Surprise, G.K. Chesterton's play adapted for television by Dale Ahlquist The Frances Chesterton Rosary League Chesterton Academy of St. Louis on Instagram Chesterton Academy of St. Louis on Facebook FOLLOW US Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT Donate Shop Chapters: 00:00: Welcome, and a guest on Our Lady's birthday 01:25: A convert, a gift-shop rosary, and Our Lady's last nudge 03:47: Three strangers, one question: are you consecrated? 05:33: Chesterton's Marian poems, and the quest they started 09:20: A rosary league first, then a Chesterton school in St. Louis 12:40: The stage as an incarnational art, and Chesterton's play The Surprise 14:28: Playing saints, and what memorized words do to a student 19:07: Teaching English country dance to freshmen 21:19: "May I have this dance": two lines that end the awkwardness 23:57: Daily Mass, and becoming small versions of Gilbert and Frances 27:32: The Society as the Chestertons' extended godchildren 31:41: The Legion of Mary, and a Marian plan for October Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

    G.K. Chesterton's Devotion to the Mother of God

  3. Sep 1

    Chesterton's Thoughts on Mistakes in Modern Education

    G.K. Chesterton gave an entire quarter of What's Wrong with the World to what he called the mistake about the child, and his verdict was blunt: the schoolmaster works not for the parent but against him. In this solo back-to-school episode, Joe Grabowski follows that argument through to the line Chesterton offers as the whole purpose of teaching—to pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life—and asks what it would take to recover the childlike wonder Chesterton insisted was education's only real aim. What's in This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton opened What's Wrong with the World with a chapter about medicine, and what a doctor's knowledge of a healthy body has to do with schools The chapter Chesterton titled The Outlawed Parent, where he charges that the schoolmaster works against the parent rather than for him The single sentence Chesterton offers as the only real aim of education, and why it is easy to miss in a book this quotable What Chesterton meant in In Defence of Baby Worship by a new universe inside every child's head, and why it does not make him an idealist The passage in Orthodoxy where Chesterton imagines God saying "do it again" to the sun every morning Resources Mentioned: What's Wrong with the World Orthodoxy The Everlasting Man The Defendant Chesterton Schools Network Chapters: 00:00: Introduction 00:30: Back to school, and what education is actually for 02:29: The medical mistake, and why we stopped asking what is right 04:47: Education, or the mistake about the child 07:42: Parents standing up at school board meetings 09:33: The Chesterton Schools Network 11:59: The only real aim of education 14:18: Keeping familiarity from breeding contempt 19:08: In Defence of Baby Worship, and a new universe in every head 21:31: The delight children take in inventing words 23:48: Man the sign maker, and Walker Percy on language 26:11: The eternal appetite of infancy FOLLOW US Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT Donate Shop Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

    Chesterton's Thoughts on Mistakes in Modern Education

  4. Aug 25

    G.K. Chesterton's Conversion and its Augustinian Parallels

    On the feasts of Saints Monica and Augustine, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski trace G.K. Chesterton's long road into the Catholic Church, beginning with his 1903 newspaper battle with Blatchford and McCabe and ending at the sacramental hesitation that held him back until 1922. They show why Chesterton refused to hang his belief on one or two arguments, and why a man for whom every daisy was already a miracle found it hardest to meet God in one particular priest. The takeaway is a habit any reader can practice: reading the world for connections, on the saints' feasts and on every other day of the year. In This Episode: Why Chesterton fits no single school. He is Augustinian, Thomistic, Franciscan, and Scotistic at once What Chesterton actually told McCabe about the "two great pegs" his conversion supposedly hung on Why fear, not doubt, marked Chesterton's final approach—and how it echoes Augustine's "not yet" The sacramental hurdle for a man who already found God in sunshine and daisies A Chestertonian habit to practice: connecting the unlikely and reading everything for truth Resources Mentioned: The Catholic Church and Conversion Orthodoxy The Man Who Was Thursday The City of God (St. Augustine) Episode art image credit: Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Chapters: 00:00: Introduction 00:33: Welcome and Today's Topic 01:48: Why Chesterton Resists Every Label 05:30: The First Conversion and the Blatchford Controversy 10:38: Reading from The Catholic Church and Conversion 12:29: Fear, Not Doubt 14:52: The Sacraments as the Last Step 17:34: Free Will and the Marriage Metaphor 19:39: Augustine's Search and the Grace Behind It 23:09: Restlessness and the Search for Peace 27:07: The Policeman, the Anarchist, and the Fence 33:35: How to Become Chestertonian FOLLOW US: Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT: Donate Shop Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

    G.K. Chesterton's Conversion and its Augustinian Parallels

  5. Aug 18

    G.K. Chesterton vs. Communism and Socialism

    In 2016, Danish politician Ida Auken described the year 2030 as a happy place to live: no car, no house, no appliances, no privacy, and a living room lent out for business meetings whenever she steps away. Joe Grabowski and Grettelyn Darkey read Ida Auken's essay beside G.K. Chesterton, who had already named the bargain nearly a century before it was offered—that privacy is the mark of property, and that a people stripped of both are being fitted for a hive instead of a home.  In This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton tied privacy to property, and why he said the Englishman's castle was too often hardly even a house The bees, the beavers, and G.K. Chesterton's fundamental principle of private property How Auken's 2030 city matches the servile state that G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc warned about The one thing absent from a utopia built on shared living rooms: marriage, children, family Why "having nothing and possessing all things" means the opposite of what socialism offers Resources Mentioned: Ida Auken, "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better" (World Economic Forum, 2016) G.K. Chesterton, "Prohibition and Property" (The New Witness, October 7, 1921) G.K. Chesterton, "The Real Nature of Property (Again)" (The Illustrated London News, February 16, 1924) G.K. Chesterton, "More About Divorce" (The Illustrated London News, September 2, 1922) G.K. Chesterton, "The Peril of the Impersonal" (G.K.'s Weekly, November 9, 1929) Chapters: 00:00: Welcome 02:38: Ida Auken's 2030 04:24: A living room used for business meetings 06:22: The people left outside the city 08:05: "No real privacy" 11:57: Renting by another name 13:49: G.K. Chesterton: privacy is like property 17:36: The hive and the home 21:19: The servile state 25:55: Bees, beavers, and the neglected commons 28:42: Divorce, marriage, and the telling pronoun 35:58: Having nothing and possessing all things FOLLOW US Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT Donate Shop Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

    G.K. Chesterton vs. Communism and Socialism

  6. Aug 11

    Why G.K. Chesterton Defended the French Revolution—and Why His Critics Still Misread Him

    Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski take up the most neuralgic subject in G.K. Chesterton scholarship: his defense of the French Revolution. Working through a 1921 Illustrated London News column, a 1905 Daily News essay setting the French and Russian revolutions side by side, and a 1918 New Witness piece that turns without warning to Prussianism, they trace his distinction between the ideals of a revolution and its working out, and his insistence that what a revolution exists to restore is the rights of man and not the wrongs of man.  In This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton distinguished the motivations behind the French Revolution from its working out under Robespierre and the Terror The negative equality G.K. Chesterton faulted the revolutionaries for—abolishing things for everybody instead of extending them to everybody Why reading G.K. Chesterton on this subject without his British and monarchical audience in view produces anachronism, and what he held against Edmund Burke G.K. Chesterton on positive and negative liberalism, and his warning that the modern revolutionist is free to hate anything, liberty itself included The white post from Orthodoxy, radicalism as a return to the roots, and G.K. Chesterton's claim that revolution is the divine part of man Resources Mentioned: The Rightness of the French Revolution by G.K. Chesterton Two Revolutions by G.K. Chesterton The Two Feasts of Freedom The Outline of Sanity by G.K. Chesterton (100th anniversary edition) The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton Chapters: 00:00: Introduction 00:30: Welcome—Revolutions, Independence Day, and Bastille Day 03:55: "The Rightness of the French Revolution" (1921) 05:26: Negative Equality and the Rationalist Epoch 07:40: G.K. Chesterton's Audience and the Danger of Anachronism 10:01: Politically Homeless—Belloc, the Vendée, and Edmund Burke 13:12: Knowing What You Are Talking About 17:11: "Two Revolutions" (1905) and the Songs of the Revolution 23:46: The White Post and the Job of the Conservative 26:27: "The Two Feasts of Freedom" (1918) and the Prussian Paralysis 28:00: Revolution as the Divine Part of Man 35:38: Watt Tyler and Painting the Fence Post FOLLOW US Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT Consider making a donation Visit our Shop Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

    Why G.K. Chesterton Defended the French Revolution—and Why His Critics Still Misread Him

  7. Aug 4

    What G.K. Chesterton Said about St. John Vianney

    For the memorial of St. John Vianney, Joe Grabowski reads a rarely reprinted G.K. Chesterton essay—The Challenge of the Curé d'Ars—written as an afterword to F.J. Sheed's 1929 translation of Henri Ghéon's The Secret of the Curé d'Ars. Chesterton's portrait is not the gentle village priest most readers expect but a militant one, a walking contradiction who denied everything his century most confidently affirmed. You'll hear why Chesterton thought the critics who file the Church under the medieval past have misread her entirely, and why the Curé's holiness shone brightest in the full daylight of the age of reason. In This Episode: Where to find G.K. Chesterton's rarely reprinted essay on St. John Vianney—and why it sits at the back of Ghéon's book rather than the front Chesterton's argument that the Church predates every nation, and why that makes "international" the wrong word for her The sharp line Chesterton drew between an apologia and an apology, and what Catholic argument lost when the two words collapsed into one Chesterton's reading of the Curé d'Ars as provocative rather than merely pious—a priest whose entire life functioned as a denial of his age How Chesterton used Lourdes and Ars to answer critics who treat the Church as a relic of a particular past Resources Mentioned: Main biographies of the Curé d'Ars, including Abbé Francis Trochu's The Secret of the Curé d'Ars by Henri Ghéon, translated by F.J. Sheed The Challenge of the Curé d'Ars by G.K. Chesterton (1929 edition, full text) Act of Love of the Holy Curé d'Ars Chapters: 00:00: Cold Open 00:26: Welcome and the Memorial of the Curé d'Ars 02:50: Making Reparation in the Aftermath of the Revolution 05:08: Introducing G.K. Chesterton's Essay on the Curé d'Ars 07:26: The Church, the Nations, and the Word Apologetics 09:43: A Militant Faith and the French Religious Quarrel 12:06: A Denial at the Height of the Revolution 14:26: Neither Medieval Nor Modern 16:44: St. John Vianney's Act of Love FOLLOW US Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT Consider making a donation Visit our Shop Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

    What G.K. Chesterton Said about St. John Vianney

  8. Jul 28

    G.K. Chesterton on the Death of Literacy

    div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> _*]:min-w-0 gap-3 [&_>_*:last-child]:mb-0 print:block print:[&_>_*_+_*]:mt-3 standard-markdown"> A new Atlantic cover story argues that America is sliding into a postliterate age—but G.K. Chesterton diagnosed the same collapse in 1928, years before Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman raised the alarm. Joe Grabowski goes solo to walk through Rose Horowitch's statistics on the death of reading, then turns to two Illustrated London News essays in which Chesterton describes a public that has stopped reading connected prose and now only kisses books it has never opened. What emerges is a practical challenge for anyone who wants to recover the habit Chesterton simply assumed his own readers still had. In This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton said so little about illiteracy—and what that silence reveals about how genuinely new this problem is Chesterton's 1928 warning that making reading "easier" signals a slump in reading rather than a boom What Chesterton meant by a public relapsing into the horn book and the cat on the mat—and why Joe Grabowski thinks he would have said much the same of reels, Shorts, and TikTok The 1921 essay in which Chesterton argued that the books shaping the world are the ones nobody has actually opened: Darwin, Marx, and the rumor that replaces the text Why Chesterton's critique lands on podcast listeners too—the risk of becoming the very type of person Chesterton described, taking opinions secondhand from influencers and favorite podcasters Resources Mentioned: "The End of Reading Is Here" by Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic "On Reading, and Not Being Able To," The Illustrated London News, December 8, 1928 What Mr. Belloc's Servile State Means by G. K. Chesterton FOLLOW US Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT Consider making a donation Visit our Shop   Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios Chapters: 00:00: Introduction—A Crisis Worth Paying Attention To 04:20: The Atlantic Article: Rose Horowitch on the End of Reading 06:42: The Numbers—Who Still Reads, and How Little 09:06: Schools, Screens, and the Warnings of McLuhan and Postman 11:29: Why It Matters: Media Literacy in an Age of AI 13:56: If No One Reads, Who Wants to Write? 16:19: Writers Come from Readers 18:31: Turning to G.K. Chesterton and His 1928 Essay on Reading 23:20: Newsprint Headlines, Reels, and the Attention Economy 25:38: The 1921 Essay—The Books the World Has Not Read 30:07: An Examination of Conscience 32:33: The Challenge: Take the Book Down off the Shelf

    G.K. Chesterton on the Death of Literacy
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The Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, where we talk about everything under the sun with a Chestertonian perspective, as well as the writings and legacy of G.K. Chesterton himself. The podcast is hosted by Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski. Want to give us feedback? Email podcast@chesterton.org.

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