Faith & Culture
262 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 59 ratingsJoseph Pearce, Editor of Faith & Culture magazine, has weekly interviews with well-known Catholic authors, speakers, and academics on a variety of topics related to Catholicism.
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Episodes
Freud versus Hamlet: Exposing Shakespeare Abuse
February 20, 2020 11:00THE ignorant pronounce it Frood, to cavil or applaud. The well-informed pronounce it Froyd, But I pronounce it Fraud. G.K. Chesterton (“On Professor Freud”) Poor old Oedipus. Not only was he the victim of circumstances beyond his ken and control, he has been tainted in our own deplorable epoch by having a Freudian “complex” named after him. For those blessed enough to be ignorant of the notion of the Oedipus Complex, as was everyone prior to Fraud’s “discovery” of it at the end of the nine...
The Truth about Truth
February 19, 2020 11:00The human mind is made for truth. And truth is the natural conformity between the mind and that which is. Saint Thomas Aquinas expressed it both accurately and in his accustomed serene manner: “The human intellect is measured by things so that man’s thought is not true on its own account but is called true in virtue of its conformity with things.” Nonetheless human beings often insist that truth belongs to the mind alone, severed from anything outside of itself. “Men are most anxious to ...
Dead Man's Books
February 18, 2020 11:00I have about four thousand books in my library. A good start. Every once in awhile – or less often than that – I go through and toss a few, usually because I have to make room for more. It makes me wonder if books breed. I suppose I should get rid of more because someday somebody who is not me is going to have to deal with all those books since I probably will not do it before I check out of the library myself. This especially occurred to me recently when someone donated about three dozen b...
Christianity and Culture with Father Longenecker
February 17, 2020 11:00 - 17 minutes - 24.1 MBJoseph Pearce and Fr. Dwight Longenecker discuss the relationship between Christianity and Culture.
Galileo Revisited
February 14, 2020 11:00Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context Dom Paschal Scotti Ignatius Press, 2017 312 pp., $18.95 ISBN: 978-1-62164-132-2 Reviewed by William C. Smart Professor Dom Scotti offers an original and thorough account of what has been universally referred to as the Galileo Affair – that is, the 17th century clash between the astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei and the Catholic Church – in his recent work Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context. The reader will wonder wh...
Desert Island Desires
February 13, 2020 08:00G. 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. If I find myself marooned on a desert island, and leaving aside for the sake of the fantasy my anxiety at being separated from my wife and children, I’d like to surround myself with my favourite things a...
The Unsentimental Southerner
February 12, 2020 11:00“There won’t be any biographies of me,” said Flannery O’Connor, “for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” She sorely underestimated the literary world’s interest in her. A Habit of Being, a 617-page collection of her letters, published after her death, made the best-seller list and established her as the most memorable character she ever transcribed to paper. With regard to her biographies, Melissa Simpson has penned Flannery O’Co...
Power, Truth, and Relativism in Popular Music
February 11, 2020 11:00I must confess that I do not watch the Grammy Awards show on television anymore, even though I am a voting member of the Recording Academy and have served several times in Los Angeles on the screening committee for the classical music categories. A friend of mine sent me a link to this year’s winner of both “Record of the Year” (individual song) and “Album of the Year”. I must confess that I am already turning in my grave, though I am not even dead yet. The performer in both categories is ...
Tolkien and Lewis on Purgatory with Elizabeth Klein
February 10, 2020 11:00 - 17 minutes - 24.1 MBElizabeth Klein and Joseph Pearce enthuse about the visions of the after-life in the works of Tolkien and Lewis, especially in Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle and Lewis’s The Great Divorce.
The Red Shoes: The Artistic Vocation - A Warning.
February 07, 2020 11:00The Red Shoes is like no other film. Made in 1948, in a battered and broke Post War Britain, its title is that of a fairy tale, and in some ways that is precisely what we get, only this is a decidedly dark one that poses all sorts of questions on what exactly the artistic vocation is and, perhaps, more importantly, what it should never become. The film is the work of one of Britain’s greatest cinematic pairings: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. Together they were to make 24 films in t...
THE HEALTHY WYRDNESS OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS
February 06, 2020 11:00It is one of the tragic ironies of modern-life that the words “Anglo-Saxon” and “Protestant” are often seen synonymously. It is also one of modern-life’s perversities that the term “Anglo-Saxon Protestant” is often pre-fixed with the word “white” to make the racially charged and acrimonious acronym “WASP”: “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. It’s enough to make the most mild-mannered Anglo-Saxon Catholic more than a little waspish! The irony springs from the fact that Anglo-Saxon England was pr...
To Be, or 221B: That is the Question
February 05, 2020 11:00Imagine, for a moment, this curious scene: two men stand facing each other on an empty stage, both clad in somber black, but contrasting in every other way. One, garbed in medieval doublet, hose, cloak, and rapier, gazes intently at his adversary with a composed and reflective countenance. The other, wearing a three-piece suit, trench coat, pocket-watch, and deerstalker cap glares acutely back, the sharp outline of his prominent brow and aquiline nose silhouetted against the wall. The first ...
Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet
February 04, 2020 11:00Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet Gary M. Bouchard St. Augustine’s Press 234 pp., $25.00 ISBN: 978-1-58731-822-1 Reviewed by Stephanie A. Mann After studying on the Continent, joining the Society of Jesus in Rome, and being ordained a priest, Englishman Robert Southwell came home secretly to offer Mass and give the other Sacraments to the underground Catholics of England. He also sought to encourage her poets to a better form of art, to turn from “the follies and f...
The Picture of Dorian Gray with Elizabeth Klein
February 03, 2020 11:00 - 17 minutes - 24.1 MBJoseph Pearce and Elizabeth Klein in conversation about Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The Culture of Death and the Civilization of Love
January 31, 2020 11:00In 1945 Evelyn Waugh was putting the finishing touches to his classic post-war novel Brideshead Revisited. Elsewhere in the shattered remains of Europe another artist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini was conceiving what would become the Italian Neo-Realist classic, Rome Open City (Roma città aperta). That film emerged from the smashed debris of what was left of the Eternal City as the German armies retreated and the Allies slowly limped towards Rome. Watching the film today it has lost none of...
The Awakening of Miss Prim
January 30, 2020 11:00The Awakening of Miss Prim: A Breath of Fresh Sanity Over the past few days I’ve been reading through Alfred A. Knopf 1915-2015: A Century of Publishing, a volume celebrating the legacy of one of the world’s most influential publishers. Knopf, now a division of Random House, has published twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and numerous Pullitzer Prize and National Book Award winners. What struck me, however, as I browsed through this volume, was the decline in literary quality in recent decade...
Spirit and Life
January 29, 2020 11:00Spirit and Life: The Holy Sacraments of the Catholic Church By Rose Rea Sophia Institute Press, 2019 219 pp., $29.95 ISBN: 9781622828128 There is something altogether unique about this book. It is unlike most of the offerings of Sophia Institute Press. It is hardcover, almost like a coffee table book, with glossy pages, beautiful photographs throughout, and reflections from 17 contributors. The peculiar (not at all in a pejorative sense, but simply in the sense of something unique, “perso...
SO GREAT A SACRAMENT
January 28, 2020 11:00Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Eucharist Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species [or “appearance”] of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood....
Music and the Faith with Scott Hefelfinger
January 27, 2020 11:00 - 19 minutes - 26.8 MBJoseph Pearce and Scott Hefelfinger discuss the connection between Music and the Faith.
“A Twitch Upon the Thread”: Grace in Brideshead Revisited
January 24, 2020 11:00In Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, nearly all of the characters spend their lives wrestling with Catholicism in some form or another. Cordelia, the youngest daughter and the most pious of them all, remarks to Charles that “the family haven’t been very constant, have they?” But, surprisingly, her family’s impiety does not seem to trouble her. She assures a disbelieving Charles that “God won’t let them go for long, you know”. Then she goes on to quote a passage from a G. K. Chester...
A New Light on a Tragic Tale in American History
January 23, 2020 11:00On December 26, 1862, the largest mass execution in the history of the United States took place in Mankato, Minnesota. 38 Sioux were hanged for brutally murdering white settlers during the Dakota Sioux Uprising earlier that year. The Sioux had killed almost 800 settlers in an attempt to drive the rest of them out of the Minnesota territory. While controversy continues to swirl around both the causes of the uprising and the subsequent events, there is one episode in the story that most histor...
Genocide, Gendercide and Other Dirty Secrets
January 22, 2020 11:00Sixty-one years ago, on January 26, 1959, the French Academy of Sciences published the findings of a young scientist, Jérôme Lejeune, which proved, for the first time, a link between mental disability and chromosomal abnormality. Lejeune’s discovery that Down syndrome was caused by the presence of an additional chromosome was nothing short of revolutionary. Twenty-four years later, on January 22, 1973, the US Supreme Court ran roughshod over the laws of all fifty states by mandating the lega...
Igor Babailov on the Soviet Terror
January 21, 2020 11:00My grandmother told me … 1937 by Igor Babailov Closeup of “My grandmother told me … 1937” by Igor Babailov Igor Babailov is one of the most celebrated artists alive today. Commissioned to paint official portraits of the last three popes, he is a champion of realism in art and a good friend of StAR editor, Joseph Pearce. In a recent interview, Mr. Pearce asked him about his wonderful painting, “My grandmother told me … 1937”. Joseph Pearce: I was deeply moved by the large canvas depict...
Theology and Prayer with Scott Hefelfinger
January 20, 2020 11:00 - 15 minutes - 21.5 MBScott Hefelfinger explains to Joseph Pearce how a knowledge and engagement with theology can deepen our prayer life.
Friendship and Conversion - Tolkien and Lewis
January 17, 2020 11:00September 19, 1931 - the date of the famed Night Talk between C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson - was a milestone for Lewis. It was the night that perhaps allowed him to make the final step toward giving up his long resistance to the Christian Faith. He became around this time (in his words) “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”. The events of that night and the long conversation between Tolkien and Lewis are dramatized in my one act play “I Call You Friend...
The Feminine Genius of Jane Austen
January 16, 2020 11:00Jane Austen is more than a giantess among women writers. She is also a giantess among the giants, holding a place of pride and prominence among the greatest writers of either sex and of all ages. She doesn’t merely tower above George Elliot, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf and the Brontë sisters, she also towers above almost every male writer. There are indeed relatively few writers in the whole history of literature that tower above her. One thinks of Homer and Virgil, and Dante and Shakespear...
The Universality of Music
January 15, 2020 11:00Four musical themes are swirling around in my head. They are events, more than musical performances, and are rich in metaphysical significance. These events involve the integration of musical compositions, its performers and the audience. Music cannot exist by itself. In order to be complete, it requires the addition of an interpreter and a listener. Nor could heaven exist without Love, loving, and loved ones. The first involves eighty-eight-year-old Arthur Rubinstein performing the se...
The Conversion of Edith Stein
January 14, 2020 11:00The Conversion of Edith Stein by Florent Gaboriau, translated by Ralph McInerny St. Augustine’s Press, 2018 132 pp., $10.00 ISBN: 978-1587311338 Reviewed by Roy Schoeman This is a very difficult book to characterize, and hence to review. At first glance it appears to be a short biography of the saint. The title suggests it might be an account of the graces that led to her conversion – how she crossed the chasm from agnostic Jewish philosopher to Catholic Carmelite religious and saint. As ...
The Theological Landscape of Middle-Earth Part 2
January 13, 2020 11:00 - 21 minutes - 29.1 MBPart Two of the discussion between Joseph Pearce and Brother Francis of the Child Jesus Nekrosius on the latter’s new book, The Theological Landscape of Middle-Earth.
Spreading the Gospel Through Beauty
January 10, 2020 11:00Joseph Pearce interviews Bernadette Carstensen Could you tell our readers a little about yourself? I grew up in rural Ohio, the oldest of six children. Both of my parents attended art school and so from an early age I had an interest in the arts. Our house was full of art supplies so I spent all of my free time drawing, or making things. In art school my style matured and I strove to emulate the Golden Age book illustrators that I so loved. Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac being my favo...
The Catholic Cultural Revival is Upon Us
January 09, 2020 11:00Something is stirring of which most of us are unaware. It is a new and vibrant revival of Catholic culture which serves as both an antidote to the poison of corruption within the Church and as a living response to the decadent death-culture with which the secular world is killing itself. This vigorous cultural revival is nothing less than the pouring forth of the goodness of truth and beauty in every area of the arts. One scarcely knows where to begin in offering an overview of all that’s c...
The Long Shadows Cast by Nightmare Alley
January 08, 2020 11:00Just as the Second World War ended, the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham became a bestseller. Perhaps more than any other, the noir genre fitted the mood of Post–war America. It was a nation that had not yet emerged blinking into the Technicolor 1950s of Eisenhower and later prosperity. It was an America still dealing with the war and living with its consequences. The book’s author, William Lindsay Gresham, is largely forgotten today, other than as the husband of Joy Da...
The Cathedrals of the North
January 07, 2020 11:00Cathedrals of Britain: North of England and Scotland Bernadette Fallon Pen and Sword, 2017 144 pp., $19.95 ISBN: 978 1526 703 842 Reviewed by Brian Welter Author Bernadette Fallon examines the historical roots of a wide range of cathedrals by weaving together biographies, religion, architecture, and travel. York, Durham, Ripon, and Aberdeen include those covered. The many black and white photos complement her observations. Photos include shots of statues at Ripon by contemporary artist ...
The Theological Landscape of Middle-Earth Part 1
January 06, 2020 11:00 - 18 minutes - 26.2 MBBrother Francis of the Child Jesus Nekrosius discusses with Joseph Pearce his new book, The Theological Landscape of Middle-Earth.
Angels, Barbarians and Nincompoops
January 03, 2020 11:00Angels, Barbarians and Nincompoops: . . . and a lot of other words you thought you knew Anthony Esolen TAN Books, 2017 196 pp., $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-5051-8074-3 Reviewed by Marie Dudzik When I was in graduate school, I was required to take a class in the history of the English language. I really looked forward to that class because I imagined that we would spend our time digging into the emergence of the English language from its Germanic roots, through the additions of the Norman invasion,...
War Teaches Wonder Woman a Lesson
January 02, 2020 11:00It’s been many years since I’ve been in the habit of watching films. It’s not because I’ve turned my back on the motion picture as an art form; I haven’t. It’s just that our family situation has made it almost impossible. By the time I’ve read with my children, or played games with them, it’s time for prayer time and bedtime, and by the time they’ve gone to bed, it’s pretty much my bedtime too. There’s certainly no time or inclination to stay up, way past my bedtime, to watch a movie. The ...
“These are a Few of our Favorite Rings”
January 01, 2020 11:00For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:24-25) Hope, according to St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, is like Faith. It is a bridge between what we want and what we have. It is a grace given to bridge the gap between this life and eternal life, for we do not “hope for what we already have”. And, as Paul points out elsewhere, out of Fai...
The Fossilization of Martin Luther
December 31, 2019 11:00What is a fossil? I'll come back and answer that question later. In the meantime, as we recall the recent commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, it would be good to consider the book There We Stood, Here We Stand, edited by Tim Drake, a collection of testimonials by former Lutherans who converted to Catholicism. All converts have to face questions. From others and from themselves. But a Lutheran becoming a Catholic is faced with the big questions that led to ...
New Year's Resolutions with Christopher Blum
December 30, 2019 11:00 - 15 minutes - 21.5 MBChristopher Blum inspires Joseph Pearce with his New Year’s resolutions
A teacher’s tale
December 27, 2019 11:00It was Saturday. School was out for the weekend—or so I thought. I had just carried my cup of coffee over to the front door to look out over the crisp autumn morning when I spied something lying on my threshold. It was a scroll; a map, I discovered, as I unrolled it, earnestly scrawled by eager hands. I looked up and down the leaf-strewn street. No one was in sight, though I felt the press of unseen eyes. The game was afoot. My coffee went cold on the porch. I soon found myself transported ...
The Lion in the Wasteland
December 26, 2019 11:00The Lion in the Wasteland: Fearsome Redemption in the Work of C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot Janice Brown Kent State University Press, 2018 290 pp., $40.00 ISBN 978-1-60635-338-7 Reviewed by Stephen Tomlinson It could be argued that one of the more obscured aspects today of Christianity, and more specifically, the person of Christ, is that of potency, or rather, the “untame” quality that marks the Gospel and the figure of the Savior. This quality of redemptive grace is br...
The Crib and the Cross: The Paradox of Christmas
December 25, 2019 11:00The spirit of Christmas is alive with paradox. The joy at the birth of the Baby is all the more delightful because it delivers us from evil. The innocence makes us rejoice because it delivers us from guilt. The Babe taken up in the arms of his Mother brings us joy because he takes up arms against the Devil. The smallness of the Child delights us because his smallness defeats the greatness of the World. The joy and laughter help us make sense of the suffering and tears. The levitas lightens a...
Have Yourself a Very English Christmas
December 24, 2019 11:00Having spent twenty-five years of my life in “the damp lands” I can affirm that while the Americans can’t be beat for Thanksgiving, the English can’t be beat for Christmas. Yes, it is true. The dour snobs in the land of Scrooge know how to pull out all the stops and celebrate Christmas in style. I doubt if any true conservative is not also at least a little bit of an Anglophile, so take a few moments, therefore, to learn some of the great English Christmas customs and don’t be afraid to int...
Christmas with St. John Henry Newman
December 23, 2019 11:00 - 17 minutes - 23.6 MBChristopher Blum, editor of Waiting for Christ, a selection of Advent and Christmas meditations by St. John Henry Newman, takes us deeper into the true spirit of Christmas.
Peter and the Prophet Jonah
December 20, 2019 11:00We will conclude our series on Peter by looking a final time at the new names that Jesus gave him. When I visited Peter’s tomb underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, it really struck me that Peter’s name means “rock,” and it is upon this rock that Christ built his Church. Peter’s bones lie beneath all the rock upon which the foundation of the basilica is built. What a fitting symbol. The Basilica of St. Peter is literally built on Peter’s bones. Symbolically—as well as actually—Peter is the rock u...
G. K. Chesterton and the Death of Christmas
December 19, 2019 11:00“There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article.” Thus wrote, or confessed, G. K. Chesterton in an essay entitled “Christmas that is Coming”, published in the Illustrated London News in 1906. Now, on the eleventy-third anniversary of Chesterton having indulged the “dangerous or disgusting habit”, I am following his ignoble example. To be fair to myself, and to Chesterton, I don’t really think that getting in...
Our Lady of Walsingham and the Spirit of Christmas
December 18, 2019 11:00Thomas of Celano, the earliest biographer of St. Francis of Assisi, described the principal reason why St. Francis desired to create the first Christmas Crib scene: He said that the “love of God had grown cold” in the people of the time, and so Francis wanted to give them a powerful reminder of the Incarnation; to be able to see and feel the immense and gratuitous love of God made man. The reality of the Incarnation, the “Word” becoming flesh, is at the very heart of the Christian faith, i...
Evil Knowledge? A Cautionary Tale from Shakespeare
December 17, 2019 11:00The senior class at Chesterton Academy recently staged a remarkable production of Macbeth. I say “remarkable” because when the play is done well—which it was in this case—what everyone remarks about is what a powerful and provocative piece of drama it is. G.K. Chesterton says this is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy because it is a Christian tragedy as opposed to a pagan tragedy. It is not a tragedy of fate, but of free will. Macbeth is a good man who makes a very bad decision, which is then f...
Advent with St. John Henry Newman
December 16, 2019 11:00 - 16 minutes - 23.3 MBChristopher Blum, editor of Waiting for Christ, a selection of Advent and Christmas meditations by St. John Henry Newman, takes us deeper into the true spirit of Advent.
The Crucifixion of Peter by Michelangelo
December 13, 2019 11:00The Crucifixion of Peter by Michelangelo Michelangelo, after he had finished painting the Sistine Chapel, was commissioned to work on the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel. On the two main walls, he painted the conversion of Paul and the crucifixion of Peter. This would have been completed nearly sixty years before Caravaggio’s painting of Peter’s crucifixion (see last week’s essay). In Michelangelo’s painting, Peter is being lifted up in the same manner as in Caravaggio’s painting. As he is being ...