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

G.K. Chesterton wanted his wife to enter the Catholic Church alongside him, but Frances took four more years, until she felt God had shown her the way. She was received on All Saints Day, 1926, and a century later Joe Grabowski talks with her biographer, Nancy Carpentier Brown, about the saints the Chestertons loved and the ways they honored their dead. Fitting, in the month of All Souls.
In This Episode:
Why Frances waited four years after G.K. Chesterton's conversion, and why All Saints Day was the day she chose
The confirmation names the Chestertons took from St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi
How Chesterton's democracy of the dead grew into a sense of the dead still taking part in our lives
Why the road to Lourdes, on the couple's last trip together, ran right past the grave of Chesterton's brother Cecil in France
What Chesterton seemed to sense about modern medicine keeping death out of sight
Resources Mentioned:
The Woman Who Was Chesterton by Nancy Carpentier Brown
St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton
The Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, translated by W.P. Barrett
Uncommon Sense: The Big Guy and the Little Flower: Chesterton and Saint Therese of Lisieux
Gilbert Magazine
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Chapters:
00:00: Frances Chesterton's centenary
02:11: Received on All Saints Day, 1926
02:39: Why Frances waited four years
05:02: The democracy of the dead
05:50: St. Francis and St. Clare
07:06: Joan of Arc and the English martyrs
09:36: Saints of their era
14:13: A married couple for the altars
17:24: Honoring the dead
19:23: The road to Lourdes
22:04: How modern life hides death
25:43: Conversion as dying to self
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

Emily Stimpson Chapman had been away from the Church for years when a coworker handed her G.K. Chesterton, and he reminded her of an enchanted world where every person is a mystery and a wonder. She joins Joe Grabowski to talk about the theology of food and hospitality behind The Catholic Table and Around the Catholic Table, and about the Chestertons, who could not have children and decided to open their home instead. Hospitality, Joe argues, is the Chesterton legacy most in need of recovery.
In This Episode:
Why G.K. Chesterton's high view of the home, sometimes mistaken for misogyny, was really a celebration of the woman's role in making a home a place of comfort and welcome
How the Chestertons, unable to have children, opened their home instead
How G.K. Chesterton and the sacramental worldview helped Emily Stimpson Chapman heal from anorexia through the Eucharist
Why hospitality is a way of being open to life
Why entertaining is about the host, while hospitality is about others
Resources Mentioned:
Emily's website—buy her books!
Emily's Substack and podcast
The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 7 (includes The Flying Inn)
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Chapters:
00:00: The theology of hospitality
02:42: A Catholic hack writer in Chesterton's tradition
07:07: How Chesterton led her back to the Church
08:21: Healing through the Eucharist
12:05: A cookbook to fund an adoption
16:53: The Chestertons as hosts
19:18: Hospitality as openness to life
20:55: The antisocial century
24:47: The graciousness of being a guest
28:32: Don't be Pelagian about it
31:43: Entertaining vs. hospitality
35:28: The leftover party
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

G.K. Chesterton never lost his outrage at true injustice, yet when a woman called him a coward for not being at the front in World War I, he answered with a joke about his own size. Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski trace how he held both, through his portrait of St. Francis chasing a leper he had recoiled from and his insistence in Orthodoxy that a man fighting sin must be not a patient but an impatient. 
In This Episode:
The formula G.K. Chesterton helps unpack: be impatient with injustice when others suffer it, and patient when you suffer it yourself
How Chesterton's St. Francis kept the impatience of a young man who dreamed of fame as a soldier, and used it on errands of mercy
Why Chesterton said a man may lie still to be cured of a malady, but must get up and jump about violently to be cured of a sin
Why Chesterton held that the rational optimist fails
Chesterton's challenge: can a man hate the world enough to change it, yet love it enough to think it worth changing?
Resources Mentioned:
St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
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Chapters:
00:00: Holy impatience and righteous anger
04:44: Impatient for others, patient for ourselves
11:51: Rage bait, the currency of our culture
17:22: What makes anger righteous?
18:43: Francis the Fighter
22:15: "A certain precipitancy was the very poise of his soul"
27:50: Anger as an opportunity cost
30:32: Chesterton's own anger, and where it veered
32:42: Orthodoxy: not a patient, but an impatient
33:55: Easy on ourselves, no quarter to the enemy
38:05: The Buddhist saint and the Christian saint
41:26: "A fierce delight and a fiercer discontent"
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

In 1926, the year his wife Frances entered the Church, G.K. Chesterton published The Queen of Seven Swords, a small book of poems about Our Lady. Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski skip the expected devotional pieces for the surprising ones, where Chesterton turns his love for Mary into an answer to his critics. 
In This Episode:
Why 1926 may have turned G.K. Chesterton's mind toward Our Lady: his wife Frances entered the Church that year, and his biographer Maisie Ward calls it a lonely time of lost friends
Who J.S. Phillimore was, and why Chesterton dedicated a book of poems to this fellow convert and champion of the ballad
"A Party Question," Chesterton's reply to Arnold Lunn, an agnostic who attacked his conversion and later became a Catholic himself
How "The White Witch" moves the moon from a pagan goddess's brow to beneath Mary's feet
Chesterton's short poem against treating birth control as the test of liberality
Resources Mentioned:
The Queen of Seven Swords by G.K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward
Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton
Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. XVIII (includes Chaucer)
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Chapters:
00:00: G.K. Chesterton's book of poems to Our Lady
02:45: Frances Chesterton enters the Church
06:30: A lonely year for Chesterton
08:02: The dedication to J.S. Phillimore
15:00: "A Party Question"
21:22: Arnold Lunn and Roman Converts
25:43: Our Lady's share in Chesterton's conversion
28:25: Our Lady's champion
29:59: Losing sight of Mary, losing sight of Christ
33:06: "The White Witch"
40:58: "An Agreement"
46:35: Bringing the book back into print
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

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 forbidding them to be anything else
Chesterton's alternative: appeal to the natural desire for a home and a plot of land, and show that real private property protects everyone's fair share
Why, for Chesterton, the opposite of art is shapelessness rather than ugliness
Chesterton's 1927 claim that films are more unreal than portraits because they are more like life, read against today's AI-generated actors
A blended Chesterton essay on a leisure state where robots do all the work, and his warning that "Millions now alive will never live"
Resources Mentioned:
Gilbert Magazine
Become a member of the Chesterton Society and get Gilbert Magazine!
Justice & Charity by Fulton J. Sheen
"Awakening the Sense of Wonder" by G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, March 19, 1927
Uncommon Sense: G.K. Chesterton vs. Communism and Socialism
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Chapters:
00:00: A new issue of Gilbert
01:15: Dale Ahlquist's finds from the archives
04:11: "How Not to Do It" (1933)
08:32: The argument from liberty and private property
10:33: Fulton Sheen and the third way
15:08: More from this issue of Gilbert
17:52: The Venus de Milo on the trombone
19:50: Shapelessness, the antithesis of art
26:35: Waxworks, films, and Felix the Cat
28:53: Robots and the leisure state
32:19: "Can't you see? It's all wrong"
37:39: "Millions now alive will never live"
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios