Chesterton is the Antidote to the Illness of our Age

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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Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios