It is always a dangerous and potentially deadly error to consider the enemy of our enemies to be our friend, patting him on the back while he is stabbing us in ours. The truth is that Dr. Harold Bloom is himself a servant of dark forces, which are subtler by far than those politically oriented [...]
Augustine is accessible and applicable because he is one of us. He suffers from the same temptations and succumbs to those temptations. He falls and does not always get up again, preferring to wallow in the gutter with his lusts and his illicit appetites. And yet, like us, he is restless until he rests in [...]
St. Nicholas Owen was one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Nobody hid more priests from the Elizabethan butchers than Owen, whose artful construction of priest holes over a period of eighteen years saved many a priest from the gallows, enabling them to continue ministering to England’s beleaguered Catholics in their hour of [...]
No, G.K. Chesterton is not forgotten. Indeed, reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. He is alive and well and being discovered by new generations of readers in many different countries. The British journalist, Simon Heffer, has been a voice of sanity and common sense for many years. He supported Brexit and has written [...]
It has long been a desire of mine to sing the praises of the unsung. These are those heroes of Christendom who are neglected and not as well-known as they should be. I am now able to sing such praises due to the generosity of Eric Sammons, editor of Crisis Magazine, who has invited me [...]
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of G.K. Chesterton, an anniversary worth celebrating wherever goodness, truth, and beauty are valued. Sadly, however, this year has also seen the passing of two good men who were lifelong champions of Chesterton’s legacy. In January, Father Ian Boyd, founder of the Chesterton Review, died at [...]
Literature is so effective in giving us a foundational understanding of ourselves, our neighbours, and our shared human existence throughout history because it shows us the way of virtue, the truth of reason, and the beauty of the cosmos and our place within it. Jared Zimmerer interviews Joseph Pearce. Jared Zimmerer: Throughout your collection of [...]
The scholarly debate over Shakespeare and his family, especially with respect to their Catholic sympathies, remains a hot topic. For those who don’t share these sympathies, or are positively antagonistic to them, the evidence that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic is unwelcome and, for some, simply unacceptable. The recent claim by Matthew Steggle, writing in [...]
The legacy of great Catholic literature that England had bestowed upon civilization might have seemed to have died out by the end of the eighteenth century, but the apparent death of Catholicism was merely the prelude for a spectacular resurrection. It is often forgotten that the Catholic presence in England is older than England itself. [...]
William Shakespeare is a mystery. What we know about the facts of his life is outweighed by what we don’t know. His life can be likened metaphorically to a jigsaw puzzle in which most of the pieces are missing. It is no wonder, therefore, that he continues to puzzle historians. One of the most puzzling [...]
Those who read as Shakespeare wrote, seeing the facts in the light of the truth they serve, will be servants of that greater science animated by a love of wisdom (philosophy) and of the greatest of all sciences which leads to a knowledge of God (theology). Those who read reality in this way are never [...]
Rosary College is the first-ever college in South Carolina to offer a tradition-oriented education in the Catholic tradition. Apart from offering affordable college-level education for local students, the college will also offer its courses online, enabling students to enroll from anywhere in the world. Father Dwight Longenecker needs no introduction to readers of The Imaginative [...]
Joseph Pearce's "The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful" is a perfect textbook for history classes in Catholic schools, homeschoolers, and anyone concerned to transmit an overview of Catholic history and culture. The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: History in Three Dimensions, by Joseph Pearce (300 pages, Ignatius Press, 2023) The best way to [...]
The extreme improbability of the “very perfectly precise” conditions needed for a sustainable universe capable of sustaining life within it was calculated by Oxford mathematician-physicist Roger Penrose in 1989. The number that Penrose calculated with respect to the conditions necessary for sustaining life is astronomical. At the beginning of his book, Science at the Doorstep [...]