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

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

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
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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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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