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

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

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 Prussianism returning
The poem's image of St. Michael at the Crucifixion, hand on the hilt, holding back his legions until Christ said "It is finished"
Chesterton's warning against a peace kept by money
A 1926 G.K.'s Weekly passage where Chesterton, arguing against Nietzsche, calls St. Gabriel stooping to greet the peasant girl more glorious than St. Michael striking down the traitor, and how Joe connects it to the single feast the three archangels now share
Resources Mentioned:
To St. Michael in Time of Peace by G.K. Chesterton
Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
"A Word with Dr. Oscar Levy" by G.K. Chesterton, G.K.'s Weekly, October 16, 1926
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Chapters:
00:00: Michaelmas and the Feast of the Archangels
01:43: Oxford's Michaelmas term and the darkening of the year
05:17: St. Michael through the centuries
08:19: Leo XIII and the Prayer to St. Michael
13:38: The 1884 vision: a legend without a source
16:42: "To St. Michael in Time of Peace" (1929)
21:23: St. Michael at the foot of the Cross
25:56: Why invoke St. Michael in time of peace
31:30: Why the archangels belong together
34:14: Michael, Gabriel, and the Sacred Heart
37:09: Humility, Tobit, and the Annunciation
40:18: Michaelmas in Tolkien
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios
Episode art image credit: "St-Michel-Mont-Mercure, Vendée", original photo by Pom', 26 July 2023; on Flickr; CC BY-SA 2.0

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
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios