Joseph Pearce | |
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Born | East London, England | February 12, 1961
Occupation | Biographer |
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jpearce |
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Joseph Pearce (born February 12, 1961), is an English-born American writer, and as of 2014 [update] Director of the Center for Faith and Culture [1] at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, before which he held positions at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan and Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida.
He is a co-editor of the St. Austin Review .
Pearce has written biographies of literary figures, often Christian, including William Shakespeare, J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Hilaire Belloc.
Joseph Pearce was born in Barking, London, and brought up in Haverhill, Suffolk. [P 1] His father, Albert Arthur Pearce, was a heavy drinker with a history of brawling in pubs with Irishmen and non-Whites, had an encyclopedic knowledge of English poetry and British military history, and an intense nostalgia for the vanished British Empire. [2] In 1973 the family moved back to Barking in the East End of London, so that the Pearce boys would grow up with Cockney accents. Pearce had been a compliant pupil at the school in Haverhill, but at Eastbury comprehensive school in Barking he led the racist disruption of the lessons taught by a young Pakistani British mathematics teacher. [P 2]
At 15, Pearce joined the youth wing of the National Front, an antisemitic and white supremacist political party advocating the compulsory repatriation of all legal immigrants and British-born non-Whites. He came to prominence in 1977 when he set up Bulldog, the NF's openly racist newspaper. [2] Like his father, Pearce became an enthusiastic supporter of Ulster Loyalism during the Troubles from 1978, [2] and joined the Orange Order, a Protestant secret society closely linked to Ulster Loyalist paramilitary organizations. [2] In 1980, he became editor of Nationalism Today, advocating white supremacy. [3] Pearce was twice prosecuted and imprisoned under the Race Relations Act of 1976 for his writings, in 1981 and 1985. [2] [4] At one stage, he contacted John Tyndall to suggest coalition talks with the British National Party, but Tyndall rejected the plan. [5] Pearce was a close associate of Nick Griffin, whom he helped to oust Martin Webster from the NF's leadership. [6] As a spokesman for the Strasserite Political Soldier faction within the NF, Pearce argued for white supremacy, publishing the Fight for Freedom! pamphlet in 1984. [7] At the same time, however, Pearce adopted the group's support for ethnopluralism, contacting the Iranian embassy in London in 1984 in a vain attempt to secure funding from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. [8] Pearce became a leading member of a new NF political faction known as the Flag Group, writing for its publications and contributing to its ideology. Pearce notably argued, based on the writings of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, for distributism as an alternative to both Marxism and Laissez faire Capitalism in a 1987 article for the party magazine Vanguard. [9]
Pearce decided to convert to Catholicism during his second prison term (1985-1986). [10] He was received into the Catholic Church during Mass at Our Lady Mother of God Church in Norwich, England on Saint Joseph's Day, 19 March 1989. Following the Mass, the women of the parish held a surprise party for Pearce, accompanied by a cake with, "Welcome Home, Joe", emblazoned on it. [4] [11] Pearce has attributed his conversion to reading books by Catholic authors G. K. Chesterton, [2] John Henry Newman, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hilaire Belloc. [12]
As a Catholic author, Pearce has focused mainly on the life and work of English Catholic writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. [13] The Guardian commented that Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc "skates over" Belloc's antisemitism, "the central disfiguring fact of his oeuvre". [14]
He chose the pen name "Robert Williamson" after a character in the Ulster Loyalist ballad The Old Orange Flute , who, like Pearce, is an Orange Order member who converts to Roman Catholicism. [P 3] Pearce's biography of G. K. Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton, was published, under the pseudonym of Robert Williamson, by Hodder and Stoughton in 1996. Jay P. Corrin, reviewing the book for The Catholic Historical Review , called it "a venture of love and high praise", but which adds little to existing biographies. Its contribution, Corrin wrote, is its focus on Chesterton's religious vision and personal relationships, contrasting his friendly style with the combative Belloc. [15]
Pearce's 2000 biography The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde focused on the conflict between Oscar Wilde's homosexuality and his lifelong attraction to the Roman Catholic Church and how it was finally settled by his reception into the Church on his deathbed in Paris.
In a review for The Wildean Michael Seeney described Pearce's biography as "badly written and muddled", "woefully poorly annotated" and using "odd sources without question". [16] Seeney wrote that it "does not 'unmask' anything", but contains too much "cod psychology" and "hyperbolic cliché" to be a "workmanlike biography". [16]
In 2001, Pearce published a biography of Anglo-South African poet and Catholic convert Roy Campbell, followed in 2003 by an edited anthology of Campbell's poetry and verse translations.
Pearce has written and published a variety of books of Tolkien studies. His essay Letting the Catholic Out of the Baggins discusses why. In 1997, the British people, in a nationwide poll by the Folio Society, voted The Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the 20th-century and the outraged reactions of literary celebrities such as Howard Jacobson, Griff Rhys Jones, and Germaine Greer, inspired Pearce to write the books [17] Tolkien: Man and Myth (1998), Tolkien, a Celebration (1999) and Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in The Hobbit (2012). All of Pearce's Tolkien-themed books consider his subject's person and writings from a Catholic perspective. Bradley J. Birzer writes in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia that scholars had hardly discussed Tolkien's Catholicism until Pearce's Tolkien: Man and Myth, describing the book as "outstanding", treating The Lord of the Rings as a "theological thriller" that "inspired a whole new wave of Christian evaluations". [18]
Pearce has credited his previously published books of Tolkien studies and "the wave of Tolkien enthusiasm" caused by Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with making him into a celebrity intellectual following his 2001 emigration from England to the United States. [19]
Pearce married Susannah Brown, an Irish-American woman with family roots in Dungannon, County Tyrone, in St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in Steubenville, Ohio in April 2001. [P 4] They have two children. He then received a telephone call and a job offer from the President of Ave Maria College in Michigan. The Pearces arrived in the United States on September 7, 2001. Pearce recalls that his first day of teaching coincided with the September 11 attacks, "making my arrival in the States something of a baptism of fire." [P 4] The first issue of the Catholic literary magazine the St. Austin Review , which Pearce has coedited ever since alongside Robert Asch, was also published in September 2001. [20]
Pearce was the host of the 2009 EWTN television series The Quest for Shakespeare . Based upon his eponymous book, the show is concerned with Pearce's belief that Shakespeare was a Catholic. [21]
In a 2014 essay, Pearce announced that he had become an American citizen. [22]
In his 2017 stage play Death Comes for the War Poets, according to Catholic Arts Today, Pearce weaves "a verse tapestry," about the military and spiritual journeys of war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. [23]
In a 2022 interview with Pearce, Polish journalist Anna Szyda from the literary magazine Magna Polonia explained that the nihilism of modern American poetry is widely noticed and commented upon in the Third Polish Republic as reflecting, "the deleterious influence of the contemporary civilisation on the American soul." In response, Pearce described "the neo-formalist revival" inspired by the late Richard Wilbur and how it has been reflected in recent verse by the Catholic poets whom he and Robert Asch publish in the St. Austin Review . Pearce said that the Catholic faith and optimism of the younger generation of Catholic poets made him feel hope for the future. [24]
In July 2022, Pearce was a speaker at the 41st Annual Conference of the American Chesterton Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Pearce's lecture was titled "How Chesterton Saved Me from anti-Semitism". [25]
Distributism is an economic theory asserting that the world's productive assets should be widely owned rather than concentrated. Developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, distributism was based upon Catholic social teaching principles, especially those of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno (1931). It has influenced Anglo Christian Democratic movements, and has been recognized as one of many influences on the social market economy.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English author, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic.
"On Fairy-Stories" is a 1947 essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the fairy story as a literary form. It was written as a lecture entitled "Fairy Stories" for the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, on 8 March 1939.
Smaug is a dragon and the main antagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit, his treasure and the mountain he lives in being the goal of the quest. Powerful and fearsome, he invaded the Dwarf kingdom of Erebor 171 years prior to the events described in the novel. A group of thirteen dwarves mounted a quest to take the kingdom back, aided by the wizard Gandalf and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. In The Hobbit, Thorin describes Smaug as "a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm".
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was a French-English writer and historian of the early 20th century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. His Catholic faith had a strong effect on his works.
J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator is a collection of paintings and drawings by J. R. R. Tolkien for his stories, published posthumously in 1995. The book was edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. It won the 1996 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies. The nature and importance of Tolkien's artwork is discussed.
Cecil Edward Chesterton was an English journalist and political commentator, known particularly for his role as editor of The New Witness from 1912 to 1916, and in relation to its coverage of the Marconi scandal.
This is a chronological bibliography of books and a general bibliography of articles by the author Hilaire Belloc. His books of verse went through many different editions, and are not comprehensively covered.
Ignatius Press is a Catholic theological publishing house based in San Francisco, California, in the United States.
G.K.'s Weekly was a British publication founded in 1925 by writer G. K. Chesterton, continuing until his death in 1936. Its articles typically discussed topical cultural, political, and socio-economic issues yet the publication also ran poems, cartoons, and other such material that piqued Chesterton's interest. It contained much of his journalistic work done in the latter part of his life, and extracts from it were published as the book The Outline of Sanity. Precursor publications existed by the names of The Eye-Witness and The New Witness, the former being a weekly newspaper started by Hilaire Belloc in 1911, the latter Belloc took over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother, who died in World War I: and a revamped version of G. K.'s Weekly continued some years after Chesterton's death by the name of The Weekly Review.
Christopher Hugh Derrick was an English author, reviewer, publisher's reader and lecturer. All his works are informed by wide interest in contemporary problems and a lively commitment to Catholic teaching.
The Pope Benedict XVI bibliography contains a list of works by Pope Benedict XVI.
James Vincent Schall was an American Jesuit Roman Catholic priest, teacher, writer, and philosopher. He was Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He retired from teaching in December 2012, giving his final lecture on December 7, 2012, at Georgetown; it was entitled "The Final Gladness," and was sponsored by the Tocqueville Forum. has been described as "a reflection on different aspects of lifelong learning" by the National Catholic Register.
Robert Charles Asch is an English Catholic writer, literary critic, and scholar.
Saint Benedict Press, LLC is a Catholic publisher founded in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2006, now operating in Gastonia. It is a division of Goodwill Publishers.
Joseph Peter de Fonseka (1897–1948) was a Sri Lankan essayist and editor. His essays were noted for their trenchant humour and defence of Roman Catholic values, in the style of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. He was a friend and collaborator of the former.
The Four Men: A Farrago is a 1911 novel by Hilaire Belloc that describes a 140-kilometre (90 mi) long journey on foot across the English county of Sussex from Robertsbridge in the east to Harting in the west. As a "secular pilgrimage" through Sussex, the book has parallels with his earlier work, the religious pilgrimage of his autobiographical The Path to Rome (1902). "The Four Men" describes four characters, Myself, Grizzlebeard, the Poet and the Sailor, each aspects of Belloc's personality, as they journey in a half-real, half-fictional allegory of life. Subtitled "a Farrago", meaning a 'confused mixture', the book contains a range of anecdotes, songs, reflections and miscellany. The book is also Belloc's homage to "this Eden which is Sussex still" and conveys Belloc's "love for the soil of his native land" of Sussex.
Stratford Caldecott was a Catholic author, editor, publisher, and blogger. His work spanned subjects as diverse as literature, education, theology, apologetics, economics, environmental stewardship, sacred geometry, art, and culture. His books include Secret Fire, Radiance of Being, Beauty for Truth's Sake, All Things Made New, and Not as the World Gives. He was a founding editor of the online journal Humanum and a contributor for several online and print journals. He was inspired by the Catholic author J. R. R. Tolkien and became known as a Tolkien scholar.
The Catholic literary revival is a term that has been applied to a movement towards explicitly Catholic allegiance and themes among leading literary figures in France and England, roughly in the century from 1860 to 1960. This often involved conversion to Catholicism or a conversion-like return to the Catholic Church. The phenomenon is sometimes extended to the United States.
John Douglas Woodruff (1897–1978) was the editor of the Tablet and later chairman of the Catholic publishers Burns & Oates.