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

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
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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
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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
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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

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
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This episode is a re-air.
For Independence Day, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski set conversation aside and let G.K. Chesterton speak. This special gathers a curated series of Chesterton's reflections on America—the idea of the citizen, the creed at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, the nature of true patriotism, the true soldier, and the difference between the right sort of patriot and the wrong sort of politician—woven together with the strains of the nation's great patriotic songs. Drawn largely from What I Saw in America, they reveal a Chesterton who saw the American experiment more clearly than most Americans do.
In This Episode:
Why G.K. Chesterton called America "the one great state in the world in which many types and races are united by one idea"—the idea of the citizen—and "almost more like a great church than merely a great nation"
G.K. Chesterton's case that America is "the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed," one set forth in the Declaration of Independence with "dogmatic and even theological lucidity"
What G.K. Chesterton meant by true patriotism, and why he held that "my country, right or wrong" is something "no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case"
G.K. Chesterton on the true soldier, who "fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him"
G.K. Chesterton's account of "Americanization"—the making of "a nation out of exiles"—and why he found the process unlike anything else in the world
Resources Mentioned:
What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton (Special Semiquincentennial Edition)
The Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Chapters:
00:00: Introduction
00:51: America United by the Idea of the Citizen
01:28: Tradition and the Presence of Penn and Franklin
02:13: Equality, Patriotism, and the Divine Basis of Democracy
03:54: Testing Patriotism Through the Old Songs
04:48: The Only Nation Founded on a Creed
06:24: The True Soldier and the War Ballads
07:35: Americanization—A Nation Made of Exiles
08:51: Fighting the Representatives We Choose
09:38: Liberty and Obedience
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