Sigrid Undset and GKC

Sigred Undset, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, and whose cause for canonization as a Catholic saint has recently been announced, was a great admirer of GKC, and even visited his home on one occasion. She also translated his masterpiece The Everlasting Man into Norweigan.

The Society of G.K. Chesterton has posted the Afterword to her translation of that book on its website:

Sigrid Undset's Afterword to The Everlasting Man

Vice President JD Vance quotes Chesterton

Bishop Barron recently interviewed Vice President J.D. Vance, in the course of which interview, the Vice President quoted GKC. (Well, technically, he quoted the famous "believe in anything" quotation which is often attributed to GKC, though it seems a paraphrase of two different passages from GKC)

https://youtu.be/aCpBXzEoG00?si=GGKPVJTGKLqgvI4-&t=2509

The vote is only a cheque that is sure to be dishonoured.

-May 15, 1913, New Witness

Dion and GKC

Another mention of GKC from Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Dion DiMucci:

Dion slowly raised his arm and pointer finger. "Now, I believe these New Atheists think that true, intelligent believers have no brains and are childlike, as if they believe in superstition and fairy tales. But nothing could be further from the truth. Everything these four horsemen bring up has been dealt with and answered by brilliant men and thinkers like Saint Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis. Nothing new here. I heard it all before when my father came back from England with stories about Bertrand Russell. It's a boring playbook to me."

-Dion: The Rock 'N' Roll Philosopher (Dion DiMucci and Adam Jablin, 2025)

JJ Niekro and GKC

JJ Niekro (son of former pitcher Joe Niekro, and the nephew of Hall of Fame pitcher Phil Niekro), mentions in this interview that he loves GKC and (at the time of the interview) he had read Orthodoxy and was reading The Well and the Shallows.

Pope Leo quotes GKC

Pope Leo recently quoted GKC:

There is a quote from the author Chesterton that can serve as a key to understanding everything I would like to share with you: "Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural" (cf. Heretics, VI). Man is not made to live closed in on himself, but in a living relationship with God. When that relationship is obscured or weakened, life begins to fall into disorder from within. The unnatural is not only the scandalous; it is enough to live without God in daily life, leaving him out of the criteria and decisions with which we face existence. [Source]

Our complex theology is only complex when we study it. It is simple when we see it. It can be seen as a whole and loved like a person. The plainest peasant in the smallest church sees it as a single thing, and the greatest Catholic scholar still sees it as the same thing

-Preface of To Modernism and the Christian Church by Francis Woodlock, S.J. (1925)

We are constantly reminded, especially by those stunted sceptics who seem never to get beyond one step in thought, that many of the popular customs of Christmas are pagan things. In one sense it is true, though in the sense they mean it is untrue. Most of us were pagans before we were christened; but that does not necessarily make us pagans now. And this is quite as true of an institution as of an individual.

-December 24, 1921, Illustrated London News

New BBC series including Chesterton as a character

From the latest "Gilbert" magazine (November/December 2025), an interesting bit of news:

BBC Television has announced plans to make a series on The Detection Club. Set in the 1930s, the golden age of detective fiction, The Detection Club actually existed, and its most illustrious writers were Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and G.K. Chesterton. The series will be centered around these three who will join forces to solve real-life murders. 'Honing their craft within the hallowed walls of a secret London location, the three writers come together after receiving an invitation that leads them to their first real murder case. The series follows the trio as they work together to crack cases, all to the despair of D.I. Greenway, a young, rookie, real-life detective.' Production is scheduled to commence in 2026. The actors have not yet been cast. Wouldn't it be great if they got Chesterton right?

 "I want to pay tribute...to G.K. Chesterton, whose paradoxical and savory wisdom was a knighthood of God."

-Jacques Maritain, "Contemporary Renewals in Religious Thought"
(found in book Religion and the Modern World, p. 8)

Trinity Sunday

If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, 'God is Love.' Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.

-The Everlasting Man (1925)

It seems nowadays to be counted a prodigy that the truisms can come true. The discovery that a new notion is nonsense is itself treated as a new notion. There is a tradition, let us say, that jumping off a high precipice is prejudicial to the health; and therefore nobody does it. Then appears a progressive prophet and reformer, who points out that we really know nothing about it, because nobody does it. He urges, truly, that you and I have but rarely tested the matter by ourselves falling off high cliffs and carefully noting the results. He insists that there is seldom a long queue, or continuous procession of persons, filing past Dover up to Shakespeare's Cliff with this scientific object; and that there is, therefore, no sufficient number of cases of the needs of induction. At last some highly scientific character does jump off Shakespeare's Cliff, and is found dead on Dover sands. And the other scientists, standing round his corpse in a ring, do not regard it as the remains of a fool or a hero or an example of the ancient human tragedy. They regard it as if it were some entirely new and interesting sea-beast thrown up by the sea. They have made a discovery. They hardly realise that it is merely the discovery that all their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers were right. But they are bound to admit it is the discovery that they themselves were wrong. And that is a very astonishing discovery indeed.

-March 9, 1918, Illustrated London News