I have just enjoyed Joseph Pearce’s latest work, Frodo’s Journey, which I find he has dedicated to me, an honour I am sure I do not deserve. It is an excellent book, bringing out how The Lord of the Rings is, in the words of its author, “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”, and I am [...]
I have always liked Orthodox Church music and now find it is on the Internet in English. This is a Hymn to Maria Theotokos, Mary Mother of God http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDPmHX-er4I&index=6&list=PL42090A646C430B91 Whilst this is stirring stuff http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7ysB50Pbv4&list=PL42090A646C430B91&index=9 The tune appears to be a Byzantine battle hymn, the sort of stuff the Excubitores and Scholae, the crack Imperial Guard [...]
Is ISIS, the fanatical Islamist militia currently advancing across the ruins of Iraq and Syria beheading and crucifying “infidels” a throwback to the Dark Ages? Or is it instead an aspect of the very Western “modernity” the US and its allies sought to bring to the region by armed force? Is that “modernity”, indeed, quite what [...]
Central to the Whig interpretation of English history with which generations of English – and indeed American – schoolchildren have been imbued is the idea that England is, and in some sense always was, an essentially Protestant nation. For over 400 years Catholicism has been portrayed as a foreign, alien imposition which the English people gladly threw [...]