"Out of the Silent Planet" invites us to see the way that each of the three main characters grasps, or fails to grasp, the radical new perspectives offered by the encounter with alien species in a physically strange place and a metaphysically stranger “space”; ultimately, it invites us to judge the philosophies which inform or [...]
Joseph Pearce Interviews Iranian Composer Farhad Poupel Farhad Poupel Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in [...]
As an indomitable culture warrior and soldier of Christ, James Como died with his boots on, working in the Lewisian vineyard in which he had laboured for almost six decades. “Having labored in the Lewisian vineyard for nearly six decades I rejoice in the vitality of the laborers now reaping the grapes of joy.” These [...]
"A Christmas Carol" is, as might be expected of a meditation on the spirit of Christmas, a literary work that operates most profoundly on the level of theology. It could be argued and has been argued that, after Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the finest writer in the English language. His works have forged their way [...]
In much the same way that Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies are all too often overlooked or ignored, so too are Jane Austen’s religious sense and her sympathetic view of Catholicism. It was a quarter of a millennium ago today that the great Jane Austen was born in the Hampshire village of Steventon in the south of [...]
Considering Chesterton’s childlike relationship with children, it seems somehow apt that a new biography of him has been written for children. One of the great and almost secret regrets of G.K. Chesterton and his wife Frances was the sad fact that they were never able to have children. Frances had undergone an operation to help [...]
The shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham attracts 250,000 pilgrims every year. Truly it can be said, in the heavenly light of the shrine’s resurrection, that the Queen has returned. One of the most exciting fruits of the spirit of Walsingham is the new and dynamic Community of Our Lady of Walsingham. Bitter, bitter oh [...]
Heeding Shakespeare’s insistence that we need to heed the wisdom of the fool, it shocked me that a recent production of "King Lear" at a local Christian university had excised most of the key speeches of Poor Tom, which enunciate radical Christian wisdom, thus eviscerating Shakespeare's profound moral vision. For the wisdom of this world [...]
Can acts of seemingly pure self-sacrificial love be morally reckless? F. Marion Crawford’s dexterous handling of such questions in "The Heart of Rome" marks the novel as deserving a place in the canon of great twentieth-century literature. Having just finished writing a fifty-part series for Crisis Magazine on “Unsung Heroes of Christendom”, I’ve been spending [...]
As we come to the end of this series, there is time for one final song for the unsung, a sort of swan song, a final elegy and eulogy for those unknown heroes and heroines whose passing from this life went unheeded and unheralded but who have been sung to their rest by ministering angels. Whereas [...]
In the decades and centuries following his death, the pieces of the puzzle connecting Shakespeare to the Catholic faith were lost, or were forgotten or set aside. But there is little doubt that Shakespeare’s contemporaries heard the words spoken from the stage with the eyes that saw what he was saying. If we look back [...]
In the deadliest century of human history, these women heroically stood for life. Of all the many dark centuries in the history of Christendom, there is no denying that the 20th century was one of the darkest. It was also the deadliest. In terms of the sheer body count, the last century, with its wars of [...]
A martyr of Communist Russia, Mother Catherine of Siena, founded a convent of Third Order Dominicans before being sentenced to more than a decade of solitary confinement. It has been said, purportedly by G.K. Chesterton, that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing but in anything. Even worse is that the [...]
Dale Ahlquist's "I Also Had My Hour" stands the art of autobiography on it head so that we can see G.K. Chesterton afresh from new angles, much as Chesterton himself stood truth on its head so that we could see it afresh from new angles. I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G. [...]