G.K. Chesterton on the Paradox of Righteous Anger and Holy Impatience - Uncommon Sense - The Official Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Lyssna här

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:

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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

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