"Millions Now Alive Will Never Live": G.K. Chesterton's Warning
Uncommon Sense
Some of the G.K. Chesterton in the new issue of Gilbert isn't collected anywhere else. Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski open with a 1933 essay on why the two usual arguments against communism fail, and why those arguments push the young toward communism rather than away from it. Then comes Chesterton on shapeless art, and a leisure state run by robots that he could only call all wrong. In This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton thought both common ways of arguing with communists were wrong: insults win no one over, and sneering at a young person's ideals only sounds like a greedy old man...
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Why G.K. Chesterton Thought St. Gabriel More Glorious Than St. Michael
Uncommon Sense
In 1929, with the world at peace, G.K. Chesterton wrote a prayer to St. Michael, the warrior archangel. For Michaelmas, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski read "To St. Michael in Time of Peace" and ask what Chesterton saw coming that made him call on Michael then—and why he still counted Gabriel, stooping to greet a peasant girl, the more glorious angel. In This Episode: The Pope Leo XIII backstory behind the poem: his Prayer to St. Michael, and a famous 1884 vision no one has traced to a source Why G.K. Chesterton prayed to the warrior archangel in a year of peace: he sensed what he called...
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Why Fulton Sheen Called G.K. Chesterton His Greatest Influence
Uncommon Sense
A seminarian once wrote Fulton Sheen asking to write a master's thesis on his work, and Sheen wrote back telling him to write on G.K. Chesterton instead. Ahead of Sheen's beatification, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski trace what the American broadcaster took from the English journalist—down to two passages read aloud here that turn out to be Chesterton with an American accent. In This Episode: The 1925 request that started it: Sheen asked G.K. Chesterton to write the introduction to his first book, received "I know nothing about philosophy" in reply, and got the introduction anyway What...
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Chesterton is the Antidote to the Illness of our Age
Uncommon Sense
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...
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G.K. Chesterton's Devotion to the Mother of God
Uncommon Sense
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...
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Chesterton's Thoughts on Mistakes in Modern Education
Uncommon Sense
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...
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G.K. Chesterton's Conversion and its Augustinian Parallels
Uncommon Sense
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...
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G.K. Chesterton vs. Communism and Socialism
Uncommon Sense
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...
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Why G.K. Chesterton Defended the French Revolution—and Why His Critics Still Misread Him
Uncommon Sense
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...
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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...
info_outlineSomebody 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
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