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6 days ago | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Joseph Pearce
Blessed Otto Neururer would be the first priest to be martyred by the Nazis but by no means the last. Caesar, like the poor, is always with us. So is Judas. And so are the disciples of Christ. The Tyrant, the Traitor, and the Martyr. These three types of men form the very threads from which the tapestry of history is woven.
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1 week ago | 
aleteia.org | Joseph Pearce
What might the new Holy Father learn from an ancient writer who is known as the Father of English Poetry? The answer might surprise us. Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of The Canterbury Tales, offers a portrait of the perfect priest which serves as an ideal model of sanctity that all priests, from the pope to the local pastor, should seek to emulate.
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1 week ago | 
lewrockwell.com | Joseph Pearce
In the previous essay in this series, we honored Blessed Otto Neururer, the first priest to be executed by the Nazis. We also acknowledged those better-known victims of the Third Reich’s anti-Christian pogrom, St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein). It is also fitting, however, that we should commemorate some other largely-unknown victims of Hitler’s National Socialist regime.
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1 week ago | 
brownpelicanla.com | Joseph Pearce
By Joseph Pearce, Crisis Magazine, May 3, 2025Joseph Pearce is Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University and a Visiting Fellow of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire). Editor’s Note: This is the thirty-seventh in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom. In the previous essay in this series, we honored Blessed Otto Neururer, the first priest to be executed by the Nazis.
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1 week ago | 
crisismagazine.com | Joseph Pearce
Editor’s Note: This is the thirty-seventh in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom. In the previous essay in this series, we honored Blessed Otto Neururer, the first priest to be executed by the Nazis. We also acknowledged those better-known victims of the Third Reich’s anti-Christian pogrom, St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein).
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1 week ago | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Joseph Pearce
Few remember Athelstan, Alfred’s grandson, who is neither lionized by the poets nor canonized by the Church. Yet he was a warrior king who is perhaps equal in greatness to Alfred and possibly rivals Edmund and Edward in piety. See you the windy levels spreadAbout the gates of Rye? O that was where the Northmen fled,When Alfred’s ships came by. -Rudyard Kipling, from “Puck’s Song”“The high tide!” King Alfred cried.
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1 week ago | 
ncregister.com | Joseph Pearce
J.R.R. Tolkien called it “eucatastrophe” — the sudden turn to joy. It’s a pattern echoed in the best of literature and fulfilled in Christ’s rising from the dead. “The Resurrection of Christ,” St. Gebhard Parish Church, Maierhöfen, Germany (photo: Public Domain) Blogs May 1, 2025 As we bask in the glory of the Easter season, celebrating the Resurrection, it is a good time to consider how themes of resurrection have been a recurrent feature of literature throughout the ages.
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2 weeks ago | 
chroniclesmagazine.org | Joseph Pearce
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn University of Notre Dame Press 228 pp., $28.00Straddling the 20th century like a colossus, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s presence dwarfs and overshadows the pigmy politicians of the West and the petty tyrants of the East. His monumental Gulag Archipelago exposed the horrors of the Soviet prison system, with its millions of political prisoners used as slave labor.
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2 weeks ago | 
chroniclesmagazine.org | Joseph Pearce
I interviewed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son Ignat in March, just before the publication of a volume of his father’s most important speeches, which Ignat edited. I’ve long known both the son—an accomplished conductor and pianist and editor of several of his father’s books in English—and the father, having traveled to Russia in the ’90s to interview Aleksandr for my biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile. In this interview, Ignat answered my questions over email from his home in New York.
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2 weeks ago | 
brownpelicanla.com | Joseph Pearce
The Spirit of the Liturgy: The Next 25 YearsIf there’s one thing worth celebrating this year, it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger’s great gift to the Church. Published five years before he became pope, Ratzinger’s seminal work of liturgical scholarship might yet prove to be his greatest and most enduring legacy.
