The Chestertonian Writer on the Road to Canonization
Uncommon Sense
On the heels of the announcement that Sigrid Undset's cause for canonization has been opened, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski consider the Nobel laureate through the lens of G.K. Chesterton—the writer she admired, collected, and translated into Norwegian before visiting him at his home in Beaconsfield. Received into the Church just two years after G.K. Chesterton, Undset shared his conviction that sanctity belongs to the ordinary life of the laity, and her vivid portraits of medieval saints carry the same paradoxical spirit that made Chesterton's own work startle and delight. In This...
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The Idea That Makes America More Like a Church Than a Nation
Uncommon Sense
This episode is a re-air. For Independence Day, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski set conversation aside and let G.K. Chesterton speak. This special gathers a curated series of Chesterton's reflections on America—the idea of the citizen, the creed at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, the nature of true patriotism, the true soldier, and the difference between the right sort of patriot and the wrong sort of politician—woven together with the strains of the nation's great patriotic songs. Drawn largely from What I Saw in America, they reveal a Chesterton who saw the American...
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Five Myths You Probably Believe About G.K. Chesterton, Demolished
Uncommon Sense
Everyone thinks they know G.K. Chesterton: the beer-loving, pipe-smoking, gluttonous genius who tossed off masterpieces without breaking a sweat. Joe Grabowski and Grettelyn Darkey take those popular myths apart one by one, and the man who emerges from behind the legend is more remarkable than the caricature—a relentless working journalist, a trained artist, a temperate wine-and-water drinker, and a mind so restless it composed whole paragraphs before pen ever touched paper. In This Episode: Why Chesterton was first and foremost a journalist—not a "writer" in the grand literary...
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How Chesterton Saw Big Business and Big Government Becoming Allies Before Anyone Else Did
Uncommon Sense
G.K. Chesterton published The Outline of Sanity in 1926—a blueprint for a third way between capitalism and socialism, grounded in widespread property ownership, local accountability, and the rejection of mass dependence. A century later, the argument reads less like a footnote and more like a forecast. In this episode, hosts Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski—who wrote the introduction to the new ACS Books centennial edition—walk through Chesterton's economic vision section by section and make the case that his outline is still waiting to be built. In...
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How One Line from G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man Sent an Artist Around the World
Uncommon Sense
G.K. Chesterton wrote that there are two ways of getting home—stay there, or walk around the entire world until you arrive from the other direction. For graphic novelist Ben Hatke, that line from The Everlasting Man wasn't simply a meditation on returning with fresh eyes: it became a commission. In this episode, Joe Grabowski sits down with Hatke—author of the forthcoming graphic memoir Home/World—to trace how one Chestertonian passage sent him east for 55 days across twelve countries, and how Chesterton's deepest convictions about man, story, and...
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What G.K. Chesterton Might Have Said about America's Consecration to the Sacred Heart
Uncommon Sense
G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1926 that "the heart of Christendom is a heart" and in this episode, Joe and Grettelyn discover that this single line unlocks his entire approach to apologetics. Recording just before the U.S. bishops' historic consecration of America to the Sacred Heart on the nation's 250th anniversary, they trace the providential thread connecting two Pope Leos, a 1926 essay from GK's Weekly, and Chesterton's lifelong practice of winning opponents through friendship and wonder. In This Episode: How a 1926 essay in GK's Weekly reveals the theological principle behind G.K....
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How G.K. Chesterton Saw Through False Progress, Freud, and the Screen Age — and Why the World Is Still Catching Up
Uncommon Sense
Two of G.K. Chesterton's most unexpectedly prophetic essays take center stage in this issue of Gilbert Magazine: "An Architect's Nightmare," a 1928 piece that anticipates nearly everything being said today about AI, passive technology, and false progress, and "Freud on Slips of the Pen," a recently unearthed 1921 Daily Express article in which Chesterton dismantles psychoanalysis with surgical wit. Joe Grabowski and Grettelyn Darkey walk through the current issue of Gilbert—the official publication of the Society of G.K. Chesterton —drawing out what Chesterton saw about passive...
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What G.K. Chesterton Knew About Technology That Took Science 15 Years to Prove
Uncommon Sense
G.K. Chesterton once observed that after learning to do a great many clever things, the next great task would be learning not to do them. That line, from an early essay on Queen Victoria, has taken on new force as American schools reverse decades of tech-first policies—test scores and students' mental health alike in decline. In this episode, Joe and Grettelyn trace the screen crisis back to first principles, exploring how Chesterton's warnings against educational fads, his conviction that machines make us like machines, and his insistence that a thing worth doing is worth doing badly all...
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The Edwardian Socrates: G.K. Chesterton as Philosopher
Uncommon Sense
Landon Loftin, editor of Chesterton and the Philosophers and a speaker at this summer's Chesterton Conference, joins Joe Grabowski to discuss the first book to put G.K. Chesterton in direct conversation with figures of the Western philosophical tradition. Together they trace how G.K. Chesterton's literary and journalistic genius concealed a rigorous philosophical mind that professional academia has been slow to recognize—and why that neglect says more about the academy than about Chesterton. In This Episode: How a peer-reviewed journal's rejection of an essay on G.K. Chesterton and...
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How Frances Chesterton Found Her Way to Rome
Uncommon Sense
One hundred years ago, Frances Chesterton quietly entered the Catholic Church on All Saints Day—the feast she chose for herself. In this episode, Grettelyn and Joe sit down with Nancy Carpentier Brown, author of The Woman Who Was Chesterton, to explore Frances's spiritual journey ahead of Nancy's talk at the 2026 Chesterton Conference. In This Episode: How Frances Blogg became a devout Anglican through the Clewer Sisters at St. Stephen's College—and why that formation made her path to Rome harder, not easier The branch theory, and why Frances's emotional attachment to Anglicanism...
info_outlineOn the heels of the announcement that Sigrid Undset's cause for canonization has been opened, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski consider the Nobel laureate through the lens of G.K. Chesterton—the writer she admired, collected, and translated into Norwegian before visiting him at his home in Beaconsfield. Received into the Church just two years after G.K. Chesterton, Undset shared his conviction that sanctity belongs to the ordinary life of the laity, and her vivid portraits of medieval saints carry the same paradoxical spirit that made Chesterton's own work startle and delight.
In This Episode:
- How Sigrid Undset's path into the Church paralleled G.K. Chesterton's—two converts of the same era drawn by the medieval and the Baroque
- Why G.K. Chesterton and Undset both located holiness in the vocation of the laity rather than the cloister
- The debt Undset owed to writers in G.K. Chesterton's orbit—Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World and the English Catholic revival
- Undset's translation of G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man into Norwegian, and her reading of his distributism
- The shared Chestertonian paradox in Undset's fiction: making the strange familiar and the familiar strange
Resources Mentioned:
- The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
- Gilbert Magazine
- Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
- Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset
- Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson
Chapters:
- 00:00: Welcome and the news of Sigrid Undset's cause
- 02:12: Who Sigrid Undset was
- 06:20: What publishers wanted versus what readers loved
- 09:58: The Willa Cather parallel
- 11:51: Belief, doubt, and the interior life of the novel
- 16:41: Undset's road to conversion and Robert Hugh Benson
- 23:20: The radical cost of her conversion
- 24:04: Dorothy Day and saints who don't fit the mold
- 27:09: Collecting and translating G.K. Chesterton
- 30:38: When Undset met G.K. Chesterton
- 33:19: Holiness for the laity
- 38:15: Why Undset and G.K. Chesterton speak to today
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