The Chestertonian Writer on the Road to Canonization - Uncommon Sense - The Official Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Lyssna här

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:

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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