PODCAST · fiction
Chesterton Radio
by Chesterton Radio
Welcome to Chesterton Radio—where stories, ideas, and wonder meet. Discover original fiction, Father Brown mysteries, classic radio drama, literary deep dives, thoughtful conversations, and daily Morning Prayer inspired by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and the enduring tradition of Christian storytelling.Broadcasting from the little station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas, Chesterton Radio offers a daily refuge from the noise of modern life. Whether you're drawn to timeless mysteries, great books, old-time radio, or conversations that illuminate truth, goodness, and beauty, you'll find something here worth hearing.Slow down. Listen well. Rediscover the joy of the moral imagination. www.chestertonradio.com
Episodes
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Daybreak: Flying Cars, Dinosaurs & Radio After Midnight
Good morning from The Little Station on Commercial Street. It’s a wonderfully varied Saturday edition of Daybreak. Tesla says the flying-car future is arriving. A remarkable dinosaur fossil has scientists looking again at what they thought they knew. We remember Saratoga and Chopin—and then turn...
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Oscar Wilde on the Radio: A Birthday Broadcast
Oscar Wilde was born on October 16, 1854. Tonight, the lights are on at the little station on Commercial Street, and we’re celebrating his birthday the way Chesterton Radio knows best: by listening. In this special Listen with Gilbert, we open the radio archives and hear Wilde come alive through…
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Daybreak: The Radio Play Isn’t Dead
Why are people still listening to radio plays made decades ago—and listening by the millions? This morning from The Little Station on Commercial Street, Daybreak looks at Chesterton Radio’s 30 most-listened-to Saturday Night Theatre plays and what their remarkable popularity says about the…
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Darkness at Pemberley: When the Detective Knows—but Cannot Prove It
🎧 Listen to the complete play: What happens when the detective solves the murder—but cannot prove it? In this Saturday Night Theatre Companion, we return to the BBC’s 1973 production of Darkness at Pemberley, adapted from the remarkable 1932 novel by T. H. White, years before The Sword in the...
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The Voice of Flora Robson: Listen with Gilbert
Christmas Eve, 1950. A 25-year-old Richard Burton takes the microphone as David Copperfield. Boris Karloff becomes the sinister Uriah Heep. And as the formidable Betsey Trotwood, one of Britain’s great character actresses enters the story: Flora Robson. In this Chesterton Radio deep dive, we…
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Shadow of Murder: The Forgotten Woman Behind a Saturday Night Theatre Favorite
🎧 Listen to Shadow of Murder first: A murder mystery in the Scottish Highlands. A writer hidden behind more than one name. And a BBC radio drama that, more than sixty years later, has found an extraordinary new audience. In this edition of Saturday Night Theatre Companion, we return to Shadow of...
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Daybreak: Why Are Millions Still Listening to Old Radio Plays?
Why are decades-old radio dramas attracting millions of listens today? This morning from The Little Station on Commercial Street, we begin with Chesterton Radio’s newly published 30 Most-Listened-To Saturday Night Theatre Plays and the remarkable continuing appetite for long-form audio drama.…
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When Sherlock Holmes Became Real | Conan Doyle’s Strangest Case | Saturday Night Theatre Companion
🎧 Listen to the play first—or listen afterward:Conan Doyle’s Strangest Case — Saturday Night Theatre (6 January 1996)Listen to Conan Doyle’s Strangest Case Arthur Conan Doyle created the greatest detective in fiction. Then real life handed him a case worthy of Sherlock Holmes. In 1903, young...
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A Haunted House, a Living Tradition
Good morning from The Little Station on Commercial Street. On today’s Daybreak, we look at the remarkable growth of the Newman Guide and what it may tell us about the demand for faithful Catholic education. Back home in Atchison, Benedictine College opens a window onto the American founding…
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From Flywheel to The Forge
More than twenty years ago, Alex and Stephen Kendrick helped make a little movie called Flywheel with a church, a small budget, volunteer actors, and an idea that seemed improbable: perhaps Christians didn’t have to wait for Hollywood to tell the stories they wanted to see. What followed was one…
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Our Lady of Fatima: The Miracle, the Message, and Broken Mary
In 1917, three shepherd children outside the village of Fatima reported encounters that would become one of the most remarkable stories of the twentieth century. Thousands eventually came. Newspapers took notice. And on October 13, an enormous crowd gathered in the rain for what became known as…
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Behind the Mike: How Radio Made the Invisible World
What really happened on the other side of the microphone? In the autumn of 1940, NBC Blue did something wonderfully unusual. Behind the Mike, hosted by broadcasting pioneer Graham McNamee, invited listeners backstage to discover how radio actually worked. In this Listen with Gilbert deep dive, we...
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Daybreak: The Impossible Room
A locked room. A murdered man. Witnesses who insist no one could have entered or escaped. And yet someone did. On today’s Daybreak, we enter the ingenious world of John Dickson Carr and The Hollow Man, one of the great impossible-crime mysteries, presented by BBC Saturday Night Theatre. We meet…
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The Red Planet: The Most Frightening Thing on Mars Is an Order
In 1954, millions of BBC listeners climbed aboard the Discovery and set out for Mars. What they found there was far more disturbing than little green men. Charles Chilton’s Journey Into Space: The Red Planet begins as a grand adventure into the unknown and gradually becomes something darker: a...
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Death in Ecstasy: Murder at the Sacred Flame
A bored journalist steps inside the mysterious House of the Sacred Flame. A beautiful and wealthy woman is chosen for the evening’s ritual. She drinks from the sacred cup, falls into apparent ecstasy—and dies. The wine contains cyanide. Ngaio Marsh’s Death in Ecstasy begins as a classic Golden…
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So, You Want to Stay Married?
In 1947, Carleton E. Morse—the creator of One Man’s Family and I Love a Mystery—turned his attention to a deceptively simple question: What actually keeps a marriage together? The result was So You Want to Stay Married, a remarkable series of short radio dramas produced for The Upper Room.…
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Daybreak: The People in the Small Back Rooms
Some of the most consequential work in the world happens in rooms nobody notices. On today’s Daybreak, we cross the Atlantic to Nigel Balchin’s wartime world of scientists, engineers, administrators, and technical specialists in The Small Back Room—and to a classic BBC Saturday Night Theatre...
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Guilty Party: When the BBC Let You Solve the Murder
Long before interactive television, podcasts, or true-crime games, the BBC tried something wonderfully audacious: it handed a fictional murder investigation to real detectives and invited the audience to solve it alongside them. Guilty Party was no ordinary radio mystery. The crime and characters...
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Death at the Dolphin: Murder in the House of Shakespeare
A ruined London theatre. A mysterious benefactor. A playwright with a vision. And a small glove said to have belonged to Hamnet Shakespeare, the only son of William Shakespeare. In Ngaio Marsh’s Death at the Dolphin, these unlikely pieces come together in one of her richest Roderick Alleyn...
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Sunday Daybreak: The Invitation
What do we do when we are invited into something larger than ourselves? On this Sunday edition of Daybreak, Matthew’s parable of the wedding feast leads us from the Gospel into the wider world of Catholic education—and then into Shakespeare’s enchanted forest with Anthology’s A Midsummer Night’s...
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Listen with Gilbert: A Child’s Christmas in Wales
Welcome to Listen with Gilbert, Chesterton Radio’s guide to the stories, performances, and recordings that reward a closer listen. In this episode, we enter the snowy world of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales through his landmark 1952 Caedmon recording. We explore how Thomas’s…
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The Snark Returns at Eleven
The Snark Returns at Eleven Boris Karloff—the voice behind some of cinema’s most memorable monsters—goes hunting for something altogether stranger. In this Chesterton Radio deep dive, we explore Lewis Carroll’s wonderfully bewildering The Hunting of the Snark: the Bellman and his blank map, the...
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Daybreak: When the Bears Became Legend
Mike Ditka has died at 86, just as Chesterton Radio publishes The Bears Came Down from Chicago, our new American epic poem about the extraordinary 1985 Bears. This morning from the Little Station on Commercial Street, we remember Ditka and the team that became something larger than football—and…
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The Last King of Soldier Field
Mike Ditka has died at 86. But before “Da Coach” became a Chicago legend, he was a young champion under George Halas, a warrior sent away, and finally the man summoned home to restore the kingdom. What followed in 1985 hardly seems like ordinary sports history. There was Walter Payton, the aging...
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What Is Education For? | Daybreak — October 9
What is education actually for? On St. John Henry Newman’s feast day, Daybreak looks at Newman’s vision of education, the new 2026–27 Newman Guide, and what its growth may say about Catholic education today. Then we head to the Listening Room for His Girl Friday—the wonderfully fast-moving Lux...
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Citizen Kane: The Man Who Had Everything — Except What He Wanted
Before Citizen Kane, Orson Welles conquered radio. Then, at just twenty-five, Hollywood gave him extraordinary freedom to make his first motion picture—and he created a film that changed cinema. But beneath the revolutionary camera work, deep-focus photography, fractured memories, newspaper…
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The Robot, the Marble, and Michelangelo
Can a robot sculpt a masterpiece? In Carrara, Italy, ROBOTOR is using industrial KUKA robots, powerful milling spindles, and sophisticated software to carve enormous blocks of marble into forms of astonishing complexity. It looks futuristic—but the fundamental process is as ancient as sculpture...
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N. C. Hunter: The Quiet Dramatist of Postwar England | Saturday Night Theatre Companion
Once, N. C. Hunter was one of the notable playwrights of the British stage. His plays attracted actors such as John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike, Wendy Hiller and Michael Redgrave. Then the theatrical world changed—and Hunter largely disappeared from view. In this Saturday Night Theatre...
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The Suicide Club: Bored with Life
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club begins with Prince Florizel of Bohemia searching London for adventure—and leads him into a secret society where despair, murder, and suicide have been transformed into a game. In this Chesterton Radio University Deep Dive, we return to Stevenson’s…
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Daybreak: Breakfast with Don McNeill
Before morning television, podcasts, and endless scrolling, millions of Americans began the day with Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club. Today on Daybreak, we listen across the years—from the Hotel Sherman to the final broadcast from Chicago’s Allerton Hotel—and ask what made this remarkably simple…
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Every Golden Nugget
There was a time when you couldn’t summon any song ever recorded with a tap. You turned on the radio—and waited. And every once in a while, something extraordinary came through the speaker, almost like a gift. Jim Steinman captured that experience in “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through,” his...
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Monster You Cannot See
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become one of the great myths of modern culture. But beneath the potions and transformations lies a darker question: Can a man separate his secret desires from his respectable self—and escape responsibility for what follows? In...
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Cops and Robbers: When Real Detectives Walked Into a Radio Play
In 1956, CBS Radio Workshop tried something remarkable. Instead of giving actors another carefully scripted detective drama, CBS created a fictional crime, cast professional radio actors as the suspects and witnesses—and brought in real experienced detectives to investigate it. The detectives...
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Nerf Guns, Rare Books & The 39 Steps
Good morning from The Little Station on Commercial Street. On today’s New Daybreak, a Chesterton Academy marks the Battle of Lepanto in a wonderfully unexpected way, Benedictine College brings visitors face-to-face with documents from the American founding, and we enter the Listening Room for...
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Lepanto: The Battle, the Rosary & Chesterton’s Great Poem
On October 7, 1571, hundreds of galleys met at Lepanto in one of the great naval battles of history. The Holy League, commanded by the young Don John of Austria, faced the formidable fleet of the Ottoman Empire in a struggle that would echo through European and Catholic memory for centuries. But...
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Win One for the Ravens
Benedictine College entered the fourth quarter against rival Baker University trailing 32–17. What followed had almost everything a football storyteller could ask for: interceptions, missed kicks, a two-point conversion, a punt downed at the two-yard line, a safety — and a 34–32 come-from-behind...
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Peter and the Wolf: When the Orchestra Told the Story
Before screens filled every quiet moment, a voice, a record player, and an orchestra could create an entire world. In this edition of Listen with Gilbert, we open The Listening Room, a new Chesterton Radio series rediscovering the records, voices, music, and stories that taught generations how to...
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Daybreak: At the Gates of Dawn
This morning on Daybreak, we step into one of the most remarkable chapters of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” Rat and Mole’s search for a missing child becomes an encounter with music, wonder, fear, and something they can scarcely understand. We also...
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Can We Build the Village Again?
Can We Build the Village Again? What would it mean to rebuild Christian culture—not as an argument or a political program, but as an actual place? Around Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma, families have been attempting something increasingly unusual: building a community shaped by Benedictine life,...
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Listen with Gilbert: Digger — Can We Save the World?
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger gives Tom Cruise an unusual role: an enormously powerful man confronting a catastrophe he helped create—and convinced that he may be the man who can save humanity from it. Critics can’t seem to agree about the result. Is Digger an audacious satire, an expensive...
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The Open Door: When Chesterton Radio Became a Place
There was a time when listening to the radio required almost no decision at all. You turned it on. Something was already playing. Maybe it was a drama you had never heard, a familiar voice, a comedy, a piece of music, a prayer, or a story you hadn’t planned to encounter. You didn’t search for it....
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Listen with Gilbert: Ask Me No Questions
Some old radio programs survive because everyone remembers them. Others survive almost by accident—and then, decades later, find an audience all over again. Ask Me No Questions, from Lux Radio Theatre South Africa, is one of those remarkable survivors. It has also become one of the most popular…
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Is It Worth Leaving the Comfortable Road? | Daybreak
Is college still worth it? And how do we know when something is worth leaving the familiar behind? On this Monday edition of Daybreak, we look ahead to the Newman Guide Virtual College Fair and the bigger question behind choosing a college: not simply what an education costs, but what—and who—it…
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Only Barbara: The Many Voices of Barbara Stanwyck
What happens to a great screen actress when you take away the camera? In this Listen with Gilbert Deep Dive, we hear Barbara Stanwyck across seven remarkably different radio performances: The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, Remember the Night, Double Indemnity, Dark Victory, The Great Man’s Lady, and The...
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Why Radio Drama Can Be Scarier Than Television
Television can show you the monster. Radio makes you imagine it. In this edition of Listen with Gilbert: Radio in Two, we explore one of the great secrets of radio drama: not being able to see anything may be the medium’s greatest strength. From the terrifying telephone in Sorry, Wrong Number and...
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The Man in the Photograph: Gunsmoke’s “Cavalcade”
A deputy arrives in Dodge carrying a seventeen-year-old murder warrant and an old photograph. Matt Dillon recognizes the face immediately: it belongs to Doc Adams. In this episode of Listen with Gilbert, we return to the January 31, 1953 Gunsmoke broadcast “Cavalcade,” written by Les Crutchfield...
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The Little Poor Man — St. Francis at 800 | Daybreak
Eight hundred years after the death of St. Francis of Assisi, why does the Little Poor Man still seem so alive? This Sunday on Daybreak, from The Little Station on Commercial Street, we look beyond the familiar birds-and-birdbaths image of Francis to the far more surprising figure G. K.…
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Chesterton Radio University: St. Francis and the World Made New
How can a man who gives up so much become so joyful? In this opening episode of Chesterton Radio University, we explore G. K. Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi, especially “The Problem of St. Francis” and “Le Jongleur de Dieu.” Chesterton invites us to consider how humility, gratitude, and love…
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Listen with Gilbert: The Hobbit Comes to Radio
Bilbo Baggins leaves the comfort of home and enters a world of riddles, songs, trolls, and dragons. In this Listen with Gilbert deep dive, we explore how the BBC’s 1968 full-cast production turned Tolkien’s The Hobbit into radio drama—from Paul Daneman’s Bilbo and Anthony Jackson’s Tale Bearer to...
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The Animals’ God Experience
At Saturday morning at eleven, we open an old door again. Fr. Robert Griffin, C.S.C. — “Griff” — once filled this hour on WSND-FM at Notre Dame with his beloved Children’s Hour. And he had a wonderfully simple name for one of the strangest and most beautiful chapters in children’s literature. He...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Welcome to Chesterton Radio—where stories, ideas, and wonder meet. Discover original fiction, Father Brown mysteries, classic radio drama, literary deep dives, thoughtful conversations, and daily Morning Prayer inspired by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and the enduring tradition of Christian storytelling.Broadcasting from the little station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas, Chesterton Radio offers a daily refuge from the noise of modern life. Whether you're drawn to timeless mysteries, great books, old-time radio, or conversations that illuminate truth, goodness, and beauty, you'll find something here worth hearing.Slow down. Listen well. Rediscover the joy of the moral imagination.
www.chestertonradio.com
HOSTED BY
Chesterton Radio
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Chesterton Radio have?
Chesterton Radio currently has 488 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Chesterton Radio about?
Welcome to Chesterton Radio—where stories, ideas, and wonder meet. Discover original fiction, Father Brown mysteries, classic radio drama, literary deep dives, thoughtful conversations, and daily Morning Prayer inspired by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and the enduring tradition of Christian...
How often does Chesterton Radio release new episodes?
Chesterton Radio publishes regularly with 488 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Chesterton Radio?
You can listen to Chesterton Radio on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Chesterton Radio?
Chesterton Radio is created and hosted by Chesterton Radio.
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