Joseph Pearce is a co-editor of the St Austin Review and editor-in-chief of Sapientia Press.
26 Facts About Joseph Pearce
2.
Joseph Pearce teaches Shakespearian literature for an online Catholic curriculum provider.
3.
Joseph Pearce's books have been translated into at least nine languages.
4.
Joseph Pearce was born in Barking, London, and brought up in Haverhill, Suffolk.
5.
Joseph Pearce's 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.
6.
Joseph 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.
7.
At 15, Joseph Pearce joined the youth wing of the National Front, an antisemitic and white supremacist political party advocating the compulsory repatriation of all immigrants and British-born non-Whites.
8.
Joseph Pearce came to prominence in 1977 when he set up Bulldog, the NF's openly racist newspaper.
9.
Joseph Pearce was twice prosecuted and imprisoned under the Race Relations Act of 1976 for his writings, in 1981 and 1985.
10.
Joseph Pearce was a close associate of Nick Griffin, whom he helped to oust Martin Webster from the NF's leadership.
11.
Joseph 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.
12.
Joseph Pearce decided to convert to Catholicism during his second prison term.
13.
Joseph Pearce 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.
14.
Joseph Pearce 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.
15.
In 2001, Joseph 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.
16.
Joseph Pearce has written and published a variety of books of Tolkien studies.
17.
Joseph Pearce's essay Letting the Catholic Out of the Baggins discusses why.
18.
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 Joseph Pearce to write the books Tolkien: Man and Myth, Tolkien, a Celebration and Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in The Hobbit.
19.
All of Joseph Pearce's Tolkien-themed books consider his subject's person and writings from a Catholic perspective.
20.
Joseph 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 Joseph Pearce into a celebrity intellectual following his 2001 emigration from England to the United States.
21.
Joseph 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.
22.
Joseph Pearce then received a telephone call and a job offer from the President of Ave Maria College in Michigan.
23.
Joseph Pearce was the host of the 2009 EWTN television series The Quest for Shakespeare.
24.
Joseph Pearce said that the Catholic faith and optimism of the younger generation of Catholic poets made him feel hope for the future.
25.
In July 2022, Joseph Pearce was a speaker at the 41st Annual Conference of the American Chesterton Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
26.
Joseph Pearce's lecture was titled "How Chesterton Saved Me from anti-Semitism".