One thing in this world is different from all other. It has a personality and a force. It is recognised, and (when recognised) most violently loved or hated. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it, is the Night. —Essays of a Catholic by Hilaire Belloc (1931). [...]
G.K. Chesterton was once asked what he would most like to have with him if he found himself marooned on a desert island. He replied, somewhat whimsically, that he’d like to have a book on practical shipbuilding. In this, if not in too much else, I’d like to beg to differ with the great man. [...]
A review of From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond by Thomas Storck (Angelico Press, 2015) Thomas Storck is a well-connected man. Indeed there are very few men who are better connected. I don’t mean that he is well-connected in the sense that the world normally thinks of it. He does not have lots of powerful [...]
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda? Do you remember an Inn? And the tedding and the spreading Of the straw for a bedding, And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees, And the wine that tasted of tar? And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers (Under the vine of the dark [...]
It is often forgotten that the Catholic presence in England is older than England itself. From the martyrdom of St. Alban in the early fourth century, under the Roman occupation, the land has been blessed with a host of Catholic saints. After the Romans left the land that they called Albion, a faithful remnant of [...]
On my many travels giving talks on topics related to Christian literature, I am often asked why the Christian Literary Revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has come to an end. Why are there no writers of the caliber of Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot, Greene, Waugh, Tolkien or Lewis today? Or, to cross [...]
Several months ago I lamented that a normally astute conservative commentator had dismissed Hilaire Belloc’s classic work, The Servile State, as being “strikingly similar” to The Communist Manifesto. Although such a claim is patently absurd, it did set me wondering why it was that otherwise sane and sensible people should have such a blind spot [...]
In Joseph Pearce’s second critique of our work on Tolkien’s political thought, he begins by saying he hardly knows where to start. We would like to suggest, respectfully, that Mr. Pearce start by reading our book, where we develop our arguments at some length. In his second post, as with the first, he refers to [...]
I hardly know where to start in responding to Messrs. Richards’ and Witt’s “response” to my earlier article on “Distributism in the Shire”. More to the point, I hardly know where to end. There seems so much to discuss. There is the question of Tolkien’s agreement with Belloc on the practical aspects of distributism, specifically [...]
Joseph Pearce, whose work we appreciate, has issued a critical response in The Imaginative Conservative to our new book from Ignatius Press about J.R.R. Tolkien’s political and economic vision. Or rather, he has issued a critical response to a short answer one of us gave in an interview about the book. Mr. Pearce begins: “In [...]
In a very interesting interview in Catholic World Report, Jay W. Richards, co-author of The Hobbit Party, a new book examining the political thought of J. R. R. Tolkien, sought to distance Tolkien from the political views of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Whilst paying lip service to the romantic aspirations of distributism, the political [...]
“There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council,” he said. “We were all a lot of silly policemen looking at each other. And all these nice people who have been peppering us with shot thought we were the dynamiters. I knew I couldn’t be wrong about the mob,” he said, beaming over the enormous multitude which [...]
The unimaginative always place a wall of separation between American and Europe, just as the naïve conservative will assume too readily points of unity where only superficiality exists. As the centennial of World War I is now upon us, a reflection on how the Atlantic world stood in the wake of that calamitous struggle is [...]
A man of principle who put his principles before his party loyalty, Hilaire Belloc found himself increasingly disillusioned by parliamentary politics. Hilaire Belloc’s political career commenced in May 1904 when he presented himself for adoption as the Liberal Parliamentary candidate for South Salford, an industrial suburb of Manchester in northern England with a large working-class [...]