Joseph Pearce

Joseph Pearce (born 1961) is an English-born writer, and as of 2014 Director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College (Tennessee) in Nashville, Tennessee. Previously he had comparable positions, from 2012–2014 at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, from 2001–2004 at Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan and from 2004–2012 at Ave Maria College in Ave Maria, Florida. He is known for a number of literary biographies, many of Catholic figures. Formerly aligned with the National Front, a white nationalist political party, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1989, repudiated his earlier views, and now writes from a Catholic perspective. He is a co-editor of the St. Austin Review and editor-in-chief of Sapientia Press. He also teaches Shakespearian literature for Homeschool Connections, an online Catholic curriculum provider. As a Catholic author, he has focused mainly on the work of Catholic English writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. His book Literary Converts, published in 1999, captures this interest and showcases the process of conversion of many writers who became convinced Catholics. Pearce has also promoted the social doctrine of the Church, in particular Distributism as a Catholic economic system. His main contribution in this area has been his book Small is Still Beautiful, which takes up the theme proposed earlier by E. F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautifulwiki

His signature work, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief, an elegantly written, meta-biographical tour de force which tells the story of the Christian literary revival of the twentieth century through the lives of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Malcolm Muggeridge, and other great English-language writers who had converted to Christianity. But less well-known is Pearce's interest in economics, and his devotion to the life and thought of E.F. Schumacher, chronicled in Literary Converts (see Godspy's companion feature to this interview, The Education of E.F. Schumacher, an excerpt from Literary Converts). In 2001, Pearce co-wrote Small is Still Beautiful with Barbara Wood, Schumacher's daughter (The U.S. edition will be published next year). [1]

Recent Books

• Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love. Charlotte, North Carolina: St. Benedict Press. 2013.