“Chesterton challenged the common belief that previous generations were foolish.” By Shane Parrish. Chesterton’s Fence is a principle that reminds us to look before we leap. To understand before we act. It’s a cautionary reminder to understand why something is the way it is before meddling in change. The principle comes from a parable by… Read More Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking
By Joseph Pearce | February 13th, An interview by The Imaginative Conservative Joseph Pearce recently answered questions from students at Benedictine College about his career as a writer and scholar. Firstly, how do you go about choosing a subject for your non-fiction writings? In almost all cases, I was motivated to write on a particular subject… Read More Reflections on Writing and Scholarship by an Autodidact, Joseph Pearce
“How did both world wars impact the iconic works of Tolkien and Lewis? Socrates in the City host Eric Metaxas is joined by author and historian Joseph Loconte to discuss his newest book, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945. ,, Throughout this book and conversation, the looming… Read More Could England Fall? Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton.
In a biography of G.K. Chesterton published in 1943, Maisie Ward tells of this remarkable trait of the great convert and Catholic apologist: “(He) liked everybody very much, and everything very much. He liked even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to be tired. After…[a particular period of]… Read More G. K. Chesterton and The Eternal Thank You
Jefferson’s pagan longings: “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of… Read More Thomas Jefferson and the American Way
Understanding the Epistemological Foundations of Scientific Totalitarianism. by Phillip D. Collins. Scientific totalitarianism is certainly not a new topic in the halls of political science and history. Given its bloody legacy of democide (i.e., state-sanctioned genocide, mass murder, and politicide) and its prolific spread throughout the world, scientific totalitarianism remains a preoccupying sociopolitical phenomenon of… Read More The Faustian Face of Modern Science
A new book takes on the throughline from the rise of 20th-century eugenics to Silicon Valley. JULIA MÉTRAUX, Mother Jones. “Elon Musk’s calls for a so-called “efficient” US government—including wanting to end the already endangered right to work from home, a disability accommodation for many—are less surprising when you view him as a techno-eugenicist. The eugenicists of the early 20th… Read More Eugenics Isn’t Dead—It’s Thriving in Tech
Updated. Calling out Europe on its Human Rights contradictions, promiscuous immigration laws and its failure to provide for its own security aims. Link to speech here Also: PARIS—Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that the U.S. would hit Moscow with sanctions and potentially military action if Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that… Read More JD Vance’s History Making Speech to Munich Conference 2025
— from Part II of the Catholics & American Life Symposium. New Oxford Review. January-Febuary 2025. On Christmas Day 1886, 18-year-old Paul Claudel — raised Catholic but delinquent in his faith — was listening to vespers in Notre-Dame de Paris. It was an event that “dominates my entire life,” he later recounted. “My heart was touched, and… Read More Karl Keating: Catholics & American Life
by Thomas W. Carroll.First Things.11 . 5 . 24 / An alarming number of children from Catholic families lose their faith during elementary and secondary school. By age thirteen, 50 percent fall away from the Church; by eighteen, it’s 86 percent. This exodus is not unique to Catholics—other Christian communities struggle with similar problems. But… Read More Reclaiming Our Catholic Schools
Even when your brain feels like mush. by Alissa Wilkinson | Jul 21, 2022 | Vox.com I doubt you need to be told you should be reading more. There’s a good chance you struggle to make time for reading, and it feels like just another obligation, like hitting your daily step goal, or drinking more water. You’re not… Read More How to fall back in love with reading
“The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He cannot sleep in… Read More G. K. Chesterton on Man
“We support “right to repair” legislation for consumer products and capital equipment. We believe more ownership means more economic freedom in the truest sense. If you can’t fix it without being bound to the manufacturer’s terms, you don’t really own it. — American Solidarity Party Join the cause! We are building a free repair manual for every… Read More The Right to Repair v. Consumerism
Modern humans should consider the plank in their own eye before presuming to see a mote in the eye of their ‘primitive’ neighbors. Joseph Pearce | August 14, 2024.National Catholic Register. Contempt of neighbor takes many forms. We can turn up our supercilious noses at our neighbors because of their skin color or because of their… Read More Learn to Love Your Neolithic Neighbors. Joseph Pearce.
By John C. Cort | New Oxford Review. January-February 1987. I’ve been thinking a lot about Karl Marx lately. Nearly two billion members of the human race liver under Marxist regimes, while leaders of the major opposition to oppressive regimes in Africa and Latin America usually look to Marx — and sometimes to a queer composite… Read More Neither Karl Marx Nor Adam Smith
Economics as If Families Mattered. by Joseph Pearce. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very centre of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern societies. In the current… Read More Small Is Still Beautiful
“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in… Read More G.K. Chesterton on The “Church of Science” and Tyranny
“Chesterton’s defense of Father Christmas reveals a deeper truth: Christ’s birth conquers every winter of the world.” Joseph Pearce, National Catholic Register. December 18, 2024. … Having defended myself, and Chesterton, from any pharisaical guardians of the feast, I’m going to risk the ire of lovers of Christmas by confessing that I prefer good old Father… Read More ‘Father Christmas’ Will Never Die Because Christ Has Risen From the Dead
By Joseph Pearce “…In the world before religion was banished by the new godless creeds of secularism, there were no labor camps, no concentration camps, no gas chambers, no blitzkrieg, no Hiroshimas or Nagasakis. And yet the new atheists, proclaiming the creed of “progress,” have the sheer temerity and audacity to claim that religion and… Read More G.K. Chesterton and the Meaning of Progress
“One of the greatest Catholic minds of the twentieth century was a journalist, playwright, novelist, literary critic, poet, cartoonist, essayist, broadcaster, and even president of the Detection Club. But he was also a theologian. G. K. Chesterton, famous for defending Christian belief in his books Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man (the latter helped to convert… Read More G.K. Chesterton, Theologian. By Aidan Nichols
John West’s book, The Magicians Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society Beloved for his Narnian tales for children and his books of Christian apologetics for adults, best-selling author C.S. Lewis also was a prophetic critic of the growing power of scientism in modern society, the misguided effort to apply science to areas outside… Read More C.S. Lewis and Evolution
Note: In The Outline of Sanity, making the case for Distributism, G.K. Chesterton argued, “They say it is Utopian; and they are right. They say it is idealistic; and they are right. They say it is quixotic; and they are right. It deserves every name that will indicate how completely they have driven justice out… Read More What is Distributism? By Thomas Storck
Catholic Critique 