Quotes from Joseph Pearce

As the Son rose on Christian civilization, the Blessed Virgin emerged as the mother of poetry as she is the Mother of God in the magnificence of the Magnificat, and St. John, her divinely appointed son, is revealed as the progenitor of Christian metaphysical poetry in the opening lines of his Gospel and in the mystical majesty of his apocalyptic vision.

In short, and to put the matter bluntly, without the healing power of grace we are not be able to reason our way to God because we will lack the desire to engage with the reality beyond ourselves. In refusing this grace, we excommunicate ourselves from the world of objective reality, exorcising the power of reason instead of exercising it. In so doing, we condemn ourselves to life imprisonment, turning our very lives into a living death sentence. Since

The two great commandments of Christ are that we love the Lord our God and that we love our neighbor. They are commandments that must be obeyed even if—especially if—the love is not accompanied by any positive feelings.

As the Greek and the Christian philosophers could have told me, love and reason are inseparable because goodness and truth are inseparable.

Love is not a feeling, which is, at most, merely an accidental attribute associated with it. We love our God, our spouses, our parents, our children, our friends, and our enemies, but we clearly do not have the same feelings toward our spouses as we have toward our friends or our enemies. Feelings vary; the love remains. Philosophically speaking, feelings are accidental; love is substantial.

In this embrace of suffering, even unto death, Bilbo is encapsulating the whole idea of life being a cross that we are called to carry willingly and indeed enthusiastically. Life is not about the pursuit of creature comforts and taking the paths of least resistance. It is about Love, which can be defined as willingly laying down our lives for others.

if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what's it all for?

Those who are open and alive, guided by the light of humility, will be blessed with the spiritual poverty with which they will inherit the kingdom of heaven; those who are blinded by the darkness of pride will be cursed with the material wealth with which they will purchase their ticket to hell. Such an understanding of reality, common to the elves of Rivendell and the Franciscans of Assisi, animates the whole moral atmosphere and literary dynamic of The Hobbit.

In reading Chesterton I was undermining my own most dearly held prejudices.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

Every evil design that is meant by the evil characters will ultimately serve the greater good that is meant by God. Bilbo is meant to find the Ring by the Ring's Master (Sauron) but at the same time he is meant to find it by the One God who is the ultimate Master of the Master. It is on this deepest level of what is meant that we discover the deepest meaning in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Why should looking through a square hole, at yellow pasteboard, lift anybody into the seventh heaven of happiness at any time of life? Why should it specially do so at that time of life? That is the psychological fact that you have to explain; and I have never seen any sort of rational explanation.6 Elsewhere Chesterton

It just so happened that they agreed on politics and religion. It was precisely that agreement that has caused most observers to associate them with one another.

Las nuevas religiones se adaptan al mundo nuevo en cierto modo; éste es su defecto más condenable...

His sanity is the antidote to the poison that courses through the sin-cankered plot of the play. Without his heroic struggle to make sense of the madness surrounding him, nothing would make sense at all. Everything would be madness

Pienso, como pensaba Cecil, que la lucha por la familia, por los ciudadanos libres y por todo lo decente ha de librarse hoy día desde la sección combativa del cristianismo.

I learned from the recklessness of my youthful relationships that unbridled passion is destructive and brings neither happiness nor satisfaction. On the contrary, it brings suffering to all concerned. I also learned that the feelings that lead to such relationships have nothing whatever to do with love. Selfishness is never love.

witches, such as Jadis, "are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical";

to overcome the spiritual entropy of egocentrism by regaining a sense of wonder in the face of the "other" that is beyond ourselves.

There was a Race Relations Act, supported by socialists and conservatives alike, which made the incitement of racial hatred a crime but there was no corresponding Class Relations Act making it illegal to incite class hatred.

Fairy stories had introduced him to morality and he came to believe that only in morality was reality.

Chesterton believed in a matriarchy where the woman was at the center of the family and the family was at the center of society and, in rebelling against this matriarchy, women, he was convinced, would lose far more than they could possibly gain.

Non-ambiguity is the shaping force of reality.

Love is the greatest preacher and the greatest teacher.