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

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.

Uncommon Sense - The Official Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton is a education podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 100 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Uncommon Sense - The Official Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a education show with 100 episodes published.

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  Episode #28

  G.K. Chesterton vs. Communism and Socialism

  Aug 17, 202648 minS26

  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

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  Episode #27

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

  Aug 10, 202641 minS26

  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

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  Episode #26

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

  Aug 3, 202619 minS26

  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

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  Episode #25

  G.K. Chesterton on the Death of Literacy

  Jul 27, 202634 minS26

  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

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  Episode #24

  The Chestertonian Writer on the Road to Canonization

  Jul 20, 202643 minS26

  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 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 FOLLOW US Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT Consider making a donation Visit our Shop Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

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