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

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 Sheen wrote in his autobiography about where his style came from: Chesterton above all, with C.S. Lewis arriving later
A priest's letter, published years afterward, recalling that Sheen told him to drop the thesis on Sheen and write on Chesterton
Two passages read in full—one on why a child says "do it again," one on a drop of gutter water lifted into snow—and what in them comes straight out of the ethics of Elfland
Sheen's distributism: the American extension of a critique he took from Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, collected in a volume of his 1930s writing on communism
Resources Mentioned:
God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy by Fulton J. Sheen, with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton
Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen
Chesterton's Marriage Proposal
Justice & Charity by Fulton J. Sheen
St. Austin Review
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Chapters:
00:00: A Chesterton podcast for the week of Fulton Sheen's beatification
01:09: How each host came to Sheen
04:14: Illinois, 1895: a quick bio of Fulton Sheen
09:20: An hour of preparation for every ten minutes of speaking
12:30: "I know nothing about philosophy": the 1925 meeting in London
15:25: What is actually known about Sheen at Chesterton's funeral
17:01: Treasure in Clay names Chesterton the greatest influence
21:37: Justice & Charity and Sheen's American distributism
24:40: A priest's letter: "Chesterton's the man"
28:39: "Do it again": Sheen on the eternal appetite of infancy
33:07: A drop of gutter water and the one thing saved for heaven
36:28: Musical lineage and the communion of saints
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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 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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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 one Presbyterian convert on a years-long search to understand how a man comes to write that way about the Mother of God.
A Chesterton reading group in St. Louis began praying the rosary together, and within a few years an eager parent group had opened a Chesterton Academy there—a sequence the guest describes as the Holy Family finally getting its mother.
Chesterton built a theater inside his own house and wrote plays for the neighborhood children; his play The Surprise dramatizes the idea that human makers work under God as subcreators.
Memorizing a saint's words changes the actor who speaks them—the argument behind a Catholic high school's practice of building each year's production around a single saint.
Freshmen learn two lines before they learn any steps: "May I have this dance" and "I would be delighted." Nobody can be rejected, so nobody has to be nervous.
Resources:
G.K. Chesterton and Our Lady, edited by Nancy Carpentier Brown, with an essay by Maria Romine
The Surprise, G.K. Chesterton's play adapted for television by Dale Ahlquist
The Frances Chesterton Rosary League
Chesterton Academy of St. Louis on Instagram
Chesterton Academy of St. Louis on Facebook
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Chapters:
00:00: Welcome, and a guest on Our Lady's birthday
01:25: A convert, a gift-shop rosary, and Our Lady's last nudge
03:47: Three strangers, one question: are you consecrated?
05:33: Chesterton's Marian poems, and the quest they started
09:20: A rosary league first, then a Chesterton school in St. Louis
12:40: The stage as an incarnational art, and Chesterton's play The Surprise
14:28: Playing saints, and what memorized words do to a student
19:07: Teaching English country dance to freshmen
21:19: "May I have this dance": two lines that end the awkwardness
23:57: Daily Mass, and becoming small versions of Gilbert and Frances
27:32: The Society as the Chestertons' extended godchildren
31:41: The Legion of Mary, and a Marian plan for October
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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 a chapter about medicine, and what a doctor's knowledge of a healthy body has to do with schools
The chapter Chesterton titled The Outlawed Parent, where he charges that the schoolmaster works against the parent rather than for him
The single sentence Chesterton offers as the only real aim of education, and why it is easy to miss in a book this quotable
What Chesterton meant in In Defence of Baby Worship by a new universe inside every child's head, and why it does not make him an idealist
The passage in Orthodoxy where Chesterton imagines God saying "do it again" to the sun every morning
Resources Mentioned:
What's Wrong with the World
Orthodoxy
The Everlasting Man
The Defendant
Chesterton Schools Network
Chapters:
00:00: Introduction
00:30: Back to school, and what education is actually for
02:29: The medical mistake, and why we stopped asking what is right
04:47: Education, or the mistake about the child
07:42: Parents standing up at school board meetings
09:33: The Chesterton Schools Network
11:59: The only real aim of education
14:18: Keeping familiarity from breeding contempt
19:08: In Defence of Baby Worship, and a new universe in every head
21:31: The delight children take in inventing words
23:48: Man the sign maker, and Walker Percy on language
26:11: The eternal appetite of infancy
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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 of the year.
In This Episode:
Why Chesterton fits no single school. He is Augustinian, Thomistic, Franciscan, and Scotistic at once
What Chesterton actually told McCabe about the "two great pegs" his conversion supposedly hung on
Why fear, not doubt, marked Chesterton's final approach—and how it echoes Augustine's "not yet"
The sacramental hurdle for a man who already found God in sunshine and daisies
A Chestertonian habit to practice: connecting the unlikely and reading everything for truth
Resources Mentioned:
The Catholic Church and Conversion
Orthodoxy
The Man Who Was Thursday
The City of God (St. Augustine)
Episode art image credit: Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Chapters:
00:00: Introduction
00:33: Welcome and Today's Topic
01:48: Why Chesterton Resists Every Label
05:30: The First Conversion and the Blatchford Controversy
10:38: Reading from The Catholic Church and Conversion
12:29: Fear, Not Doubt
14:52: The Sacraments as the Last Step
17:34: Free Will and the Marriage Metaphor
19:39: Augustine's Search and the Grace Behind It
23:09: Restlessness and the Search for Peace
27:07: The Policeman, the Anarchist, and the Fence
33:35: How to Become Chestertonian
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Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios