Joseph Pearce writes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and I go back a long way. I first met him in the newspapers and on the TV news when I was a child, in the early seventies. Solzhenitsyn was so famous in those days that his face was instantly recognized; no caption was needed under his photograph. He had… Read More Possibly this generation’s greatest Catholic Writer* and his friendship with Solzhenitsyn
As this website has been emphasizing for some 5 years and in so many ways, the decline of the humanities and reading is very alarming. Ross Douthat and guest Jennifer Frey ask, “What’s really driving the humanities crisis in higher education?” Douthat: As enrollment and reading decline, I asked Jennifer Frey, a professor of philosophy,… Read More The Best Defense Against AI is Reading Plato …
It was a dream. Needless to say, it was not a vision. If I ever had a vision I would likely run for the psychiatric couch, not to a pope. I cannot remember whether it was a day or a night dream. The city hung heavy over us all. I was lifting a lantern before… Read More The City and the Cross
Confessions of an Apostate. By Christopher Derrick. | The New Oxford Review.November 1985. “The world has quite enough chemists, but it hasn’t got nearly enough good Catholic writers. You write well for your age: I want you to continue Chesterton’s work to the best of your ability.” –Christopher Derrick. I have a story to tell you,… Read More A Chestertonian Adrift in an Ideological World
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
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
“There is a very good reason for every Catholic to know the great works of literature—and that is because the great works of literature help us to know ourselves. This is the reason that we should learn the humanities—because the humanities teach us about humanity, both our own humanity and the humanity of our neighbours.… Read More Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know. Joseph Pearce.
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.
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
History is full of surprises. One such surprise is the manner in which the secularist cataclysm of the French Revolution prompted a religious revival across the Channel in England. It was indeed ironic that the new spirit of absolute religious intolerance in France following that country’s Revolution of 1789 prompted a new spirit of relative… Read More Joseph Pearce on Secular Revolution & Hope: A History Lesson
Rosary College is a two-year liberal arts college in the Catholic tradition offering courses in the humanities ordered toward readiness to serve within the Church and society. It finds inspiration in the Benedictine tradition of integrating prayer and work and expressing beauty for the glory of God. Immersing students in the legacy of the life… Read More The Birth of Rosary College: Application Open for Fall 2024
“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
G.K. Chesterton and the Meaning of Progress by Joseph Pearce. “Progress is a useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined direction: and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree.” G.K. Chesterton c. 1920 (photo: Public Domain).National Catholic Registerwith permission of author. The great British writer G.K. Chesterton insisted that progress… Read More What Good is ‘Progress’ in the Wrong Direction?
Oscar Wilde the would-be saint and Oscar Wilde the woeful sinner were in deadly conflict, one with the other… By Joseph Pearce|Liberal Learning, Literature. Oscar Wilde’s life is more scandalous today than it was during the Decadence of the 1890s. In fact, it is so scandalous that a current exhibition of his life and legacy… Read More Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Secret
… Being careful to provide and protect the hermeneutic of continuity of Pope Benedict XVI. “Built in the mid-14th century, and dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, this chapel served pilgrims on their way to England’s Nazareth. Saint Catherine was the patron saint of pilgrims to the Holy Land and her knights kept open the… Read More Could Walsingham point the way to a post-Francis liturgical renewal?
“…The Christmas season represented rich pickings for the priest hunters [in Elizabethan England]. As one of the great celebrations of the Catholic Church, it was disapproved of by some Protestant reformers. More than that, it was a great opportunity to flush out Catholic priests – all of whom had been outlawed by the state during… Read More The Secret ‘Priest Holes’ of England
How do we experience life? What is it to be human? How do we see? What is the relationship between reading and history, reading and science, metaphysics…empathy, philosophy, religion and art? …More. — How to Mark a Book by Mortimer Adler — The social disaster: Children who frequently check social media face significant brain changes
There are many people who will cite the West as something which is under threat and something for which we should be prepared to fight to defend. Depending on which defender of the West is pontificating, the threat comes from Russia, or from Islam, or from China, or from some enemy within the West itself.… Read More Is the West Worth Defending? By Joseph Pearce.
The New Oxford Review. In our October [1987] symposium, Thomas Molnar, an authority on all things French, threw out the intriguing morsel that the New Oxford Review seems to be following in the footsteps of Esprit, the French Catholic review founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier (who lived from 1905 to 1950). Although we would… Read More Are We “Personalists”?
By Joseph Pearce. As mentioned earlier … I was honoured to be asked to write the introduction to the first Spanish edition of the play, Sir Thomas More, which was authored by Shakespeare in collaboration with several other contemporary playwrights. Querying some of the assertions that I made in that introduction, a Spanish correspondence wrote to… Read More Shakespeare, Thomas More, and Henry VIII
“Vilified by fellow Victorians for his sexuality and his dandyism, Oscar Wilde, the great poet, satirist and playwright, is hailed today, in some circles, as a “progressive” sexual liberator. But this is not how Wilde saw himself. His actions and pretensions did not bring him happiness and fulfillment. This study of Wilde’s brilliant and tragic… Read More The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. Joseph Pearce.
“World-renowned philosopher, humorist, newspaper editor, and university rector, British writer Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) is best known to American audiences for his book Something Beautiful for God (a classic biography of Mother Teresa that essentially introduced her to the West) and for his frequent appearances on Firing Line. A tart-tongued agnostic, Muggeridge was fascinated by the… Read More Malcolm Muggeridge. A Third Testament.
There are many people who will cite the West as something which is under threat and something for which we should be prepared to fight to defend. Depending on which defender of the West is pontificating, the threat comes from Russia, or from Islam, or from China, or from some enemy within the West itself.… Read More Is the West worth Defending? by Joseph Pearce
