About Joseph Pearce

Joseph Pearce is Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. A native of England, Mr. Pearce is the St. John Henry Newman Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas More College (Merrimack, NH), editor of the St. Austin Review, and series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions. He is the author of numerous books, which include The Quest for ShakespeareTolkien: Man and Myth The Unmasking of Oscar WildeC. S. Lewis and The Catholic ChurchLiterary ConvertsWisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. ChestertonSolzhenitsyn: A Soul in ExileOld Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc, and Further Up & Further In: Understanding Narnia. Visit his personal website at jpearce.co.

The Legacy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn

By |2023-12-10T14:27:42-06:00December 10th, 2023|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Books, Christianity, History, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

The scholarship of Lee Congdon’s “Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West” is sound, demonstrating a breadth of knowledge and a depth of understanding of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s worldview. Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West by Lee Congdon (164 pages, Northern Illinois University Press, 2017) This December will mark the centenary of [...]

Macbeth Revisited: The Decline & Fall of Friedrich Nietzsche

By |2024-03-12T20:54:17-05:00November 29th, 2023|Categories: Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare|

Macbeth loses his head and soul in the unknowing clouds of his own sin-deceived ego. So does Nietzsche. Far from seeing life as a quest for truth, they are left with nothing but their own bitter inquest on life, “signifying nothing”. This is the “deepest consequence” of their rejection of faith and reason. I’ve recently [...]

The Best and Worst of Centuries

By |2023-11-23T00:27:07-06:00November 23rd, 2023|Categories: Christendom, History, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors|

Is there a century in human history which can claim to be better than all the others? Many, especially Catholics, might argue that the thirteenth century deserves such an accolade. According to Church historian, Alan Schreck, this was “the greatest century of spiritual, cultural, and intellectual advancement in the history of Western civilization”. It was [...]

Christianity and Progress

By |2023-11-19T19:02:39-06:00November 19th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Gospel Reflection, Joseph Pearce, Progressivism, Timeless Essays|

Although Christians cannot be above the fray because we are part of it—called and commanded to love our neighbours, and even our enemies—we are nonetheless beyond the fray in the sense that we are called to something beyond it. “My own view is that Christianity is all about progress,” wrote ‘Eric’ in a comment on [...]

Beauty and the Beast of War: Remembering George Butterworth

By |2023-11-15T18:06:06-06:00November 15th, 2023|Categories: England, Joseph Pearce, Music, Senior Contributors|

Apart from the breathtaking beauty of his musical compositions, it is the ethos of Butterworth that attracts me. He was rooted in the soil and soul of England and enamoured of its shires. He was a true localist before the word was invented, the very antithesis of the modern and modish cosmopolitan. If I should [...]

Was Ophelia a Virgin?

By |2023-11-07T20:01:57-06:00November 7th, 2023|Categories: Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare|

The inspiration for the writing of essays can come from the most surprising and unusual of places. Recently, I received an email from a woman whose homeschooled daughter had asked her whether Hamlet and Ophelia had slept together. This prompted her to ask me for my thoughts on the matter. My initial thought was that [...]

Her Immaculate Majesty: The Queen of England

By |2023-11-05T16:23:58-06:00November 5th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, England, Joseph Pearce, Mother of God, Sainthood, Senior Contributors|

The reason for Walsingham’s importance is its association with the Marian apparitions to a pious English noblewoman in 1061. By the middle of the fourteenth century, people considered England to be “Our Lady’s dowry” and that she was, in some special sense, the protectress of the English people. Few people in today’s godless England have [...]

A Haunted Handful of Poems for Halloween

By |2023-10-30T19:01:03-05:00October 30th, 2023|Categories: Halloween, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

There are good and bad ways of celebrating Halloween as there are good and bad ways of celebrating anything else. One of the best ways is with the reading of some haunting literature. Ghost stories come to mind. So does poetry which reminds us of death and the dead. Here is a handful of haunting [...]

Homer versus Virgil

By |2023-10-14T16:49:32-05:00October 14th, 2023|Categories: Greek Epic Poetry, Homer, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Virgil, Western Tradition|

What do the great literary epics tell us about the epochs in which they were written? And, more important, what do these epics and epochs tell us about our own epoch? To what extent are literary epics the children of their own times, expressions of their own particular zeitgeist, and to what extent are they [...]

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