In seeing his broken and mortal body in the light of the permanence of his immortal soul, novelist Maurice Baring learned to accept his affliction. Such acceptance is not only the secret of life, as his priest character had proclaimed, it is also the secret of love. There is a painting in London’s National Portrait [...]
Something is stirring underground. Something exciting. Something new. Something invigorating. Refreshing. Needed. The something to which I refer is a new Catholic cultural revival, which is being made manifest in the visual arts, music and most especially in literature. Last week, in the first of these “notes from underground”, I focused on murder mysteries being [...]
Perhaps the final fall that proceeds from a life of prideful “success,” irrespective of the judgment of God which follows, is the miserable way in which tyrants die. I was intrigued by some of the comments prompted by my essay “Does History Repeat Itself?” In particular, my eyebrows were raised by the objections to my [...]
These six composers might not have been saints, but the splendor of their voices bears a living witness to the Lord. Well may we hope and pray that their songs may continue to be sung and that they may be heard more clearly amid the din and discord of our modern world. Christianity has died [...]
Today, in the real-life web of deceit, depravity, and diabolical darkness in which we find ourselves, good and healthy murder mysteries can inoculate the soul of the reader from the toxic mainstream. They help to expose the crimes of the culture of death, serving as undercover agents in the countercultural underground. The culture of death [...]
Where there is Pride, there is prejudice; where there is prejudice, there is hatred; where there is hatred, there is the dehumanizing of the enemy; and where there is the dehumanizing of the enemy, there is the extermination that follows. As I watch the rise of the politics of hatred sweep like an angry wave [...]
Sign up for Joseph Pearce’s course on Classical Epic and Tragedy this Fall: https://rosary.college/applicant-registration/ 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 [...]
During the reign of the Danish king Canute, a devout Christian, the Faith in England flourished. The high tide,” King Alfred cried. “The high tide and the turn!” Such was the battle cry of Alfred the Great, rallying the Anglo-Saxons against the pagan Danes, as imagined by G.K. Chesterton in his epic poem The Ballad [...]
Shakespeare’s sisters come in all shapes and sizes, good, bad and ugly. So do his men. He believed in the mystical equality of the sexes and the inherent dignity of the human person because he knew that all men and women are made in the image of God. It’s almost a century since Virginia Woolf [...]
When I read Maurice Baring, I feel that, culturally, he is walking on a crystal floor above my head. He is so well read in so many different languages and so well-versed in the full panoramic landscape of Western literature, that I am in awe at the depth and the breadth of cultural experience from [...]
Joseph Pearce’s “C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church” presents a compelling case in suggesting that its subject evolved “into a very Catholic sort of Protestant.” Though C.S. Lewis never became a Roman Catholic, his later works betray a growing affinity for Catholic teaching. C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, by Joseph Pearce (220 pages, [...]
Roy Campbell (on the left) Most Catholics have never heard of Roy Campbell. He is forgotten. Neglected. Buried, so it seems, by the inexorable and merciless sands of time. Such neglect is nothing short of scandalous. There was a time, however, when he enjoyed fame and endured infamy, a time in which the [...]
Not just as a Protestant, but as an American, I am not used to having history presented to me from a Catholic point of view. Here are four things Joseph Pearce's "The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful" taught me, and can teach Christians of all denominations, particularly evangelicals. The Good, the Bad, and the [...]
Raffaella Maria Stroik, a 23-year-old ballerina, died tragically in November 2018, drowning in a lake in Missouri. This real-life tragedy has now been transformed or transfigured, as if by magic or miracle, into a beautiful fairytale ballet, inspired by Raffaella’s devout and fervent Catholic faith. Fairyland and perfection have a great deal in common. They [...]