In many respects, Hilaire Belloc can be seen as Chesterton’s other brother, with whom he neither argued nor quarreled. Such fraternal friendships are forged in faith and find their fulfilment in heaven. We can be sure, therefore, that, irrespective of their sins and weaknesses, they are now not merely brothers in arms but brothers in [...]
H.G. Wells sought to free humanity from the “bondage” of tradition, but T.S. Eliot saw history not as an evolutionary movement, but a return to the past. While T.S. Eliot never made any comments critical of Charles Darwin or his theory of the evolution of species, he was quite critical of various popularized versions of [...]
A friend of Christendom and of civilization in an age of decadence and barbarism, Hilaire Belloc thundered against the heresies of his age and defied the storms of war and secularism. Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) is not as well-known as he and his talent deserve. From the last years of the reign of Queen Victoria until [...]
Hilaire Belloc’s "The Path to Rome" takes the reader on a journey into himself and out of himself, a voyage of discovery in which home and exile are interwoven in a mystical dance of contemplation. In its pages we discover the Europe of the Faith, which was, and is, the heart of Christendom, and the [...]
Written to record a four-week, 750-mile pilgrimage from Toul, France, to Rome for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, "The Path of Rome" epitomizes Hilaire Belloc’s capacity for alternating the heights of sublimity, the depths of profundity, and broad belly laughs of old jokes. Although as a popular historian and religious and political polemicist [...]
President Orbán has the courage and integrity to stand up to the secularist bullying of the European Union and to the efforts to force Hungary to allow countless Islamic immigrants into its midst. And yet even heroes need correcting when they get things wrong… The discussion of Hillaire Belloc’s writing on Europe and the Faith, [...]
Europe may indeed perish, crucified by the sins, errors, and heresies of her own sons, but Christianity will never perish because, as Chesterton reminds us, it has a God who knows the way out of the grave… The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith. Hilaire Belloc These words of Hilaire Belloc, possibly the [...]
What ideology ever threatened America more than Islamic extremism? And yet might Islam, which once helped save and preserve Western thought and culture a thousand years ago, do something similar this century, helping to bring us back to a more spiritual, less materialistic, epoch?… 1938. The world is on the threshold of the most devastating war [...]
The Shakespeare scholar who crossed swords with C.S. Lewis describes Lewis in the early 1950s, at the height of his fame, as “a red-faced, egg-headed, portly, jolly, middle-aged man, who was (like Old King Cole) fond of his pipe and his glass of beer.” Father Peter Milward Father Peter Milward SJ, who died [...]
The mystery is how one person whom I never met, through recountings down the ages of how many others whom I also have never met, could shed light on each other, eventually to enlighten me. In The Apology, Socrates brought up the question of whether he was paid for being a teacher, like the Sophists, who were paid [...]
Some years ago you heard me sing My doubts on Alexander Byng. His sister Sarah now inspires My jaded Muse, my failing fires. […]
How do employee-owned companies fare in the wider economy? How do they compete in the dog-eat-dog world of business?… Many years ago, back in England and long before my conversion, I stumbled upon a book called The Man Who Gave His Company Away. It was a biography of Ernest Bader, a very successful entrepreneur in [...]
There are moves afoot to whip up the old Cold War angst and anger and to resurrect enmity towards Russia. Liberals in the West, outraged at Russia’s resistance to their decadent agenda, are caricaturing Russia as an enemy of Western “values.” In 1998 I had the inestimable pleasure and honour of interviewing Alexander Solzhenitsyn at [...]
“Capitalism” needs to be pinned down by definition; it needs to be circumscribed so that it doesn’t lead us off in increasingly meaningless and therefore futile lines of reasoning… If words are to have any value they must have definite and definable meanings. If too many meanings are ascribed to a single word, the word [...]