What G.K. Chesterton Said about St. John Vianney
Uncommon Sense
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...
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G.K. Chesterton on the Death of Literacy
Uncommon Sense
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...
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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...
info_outlineFor 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
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