Saturday

My One True Love

I have an unfortunate tendency to fall in love with dead guys. This one barely intersected with my parents' lifetime! Be that as it may, Hilaire Belloc remains one of my favorite people of all time. Most people prefer GK Chesterton's method of defending the Catholicsm...i.e., kind and jolly and polite. Belloc's pugnacious style definitely is my cup of tea. If you can, get a hold of Joseph Pearce's biography of Belloc, Old Thunder. Pearce is an exceptional biographer, and his books are all worth reading. Here's an example that shows why Belloc makes me smile. When running for Parliament, he was confronted with a lot of anti-Catholic bigotry, naturally, but instead of being politic, he met it head on: "Gentlemen, I am a Catholic...If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative." Anyway, go read Pearce's biography of him.

4 comments:

Ben Milton said...

Belloc is cool, but I've hardly read anything by him...just the beginning of a book he did on Richelieu. That was pretty neat.

Catherine_Creagan said...

He wrote a ton of history books, for some reason, yeah. And those hilarious morality tales for little kids.

Ben Milton said...

Oh MAN! That one with the girl who was lying or something and got burned to death? I vaguely remember that...heh. :-)

Catherine_Creagan said...

Yes...and the one about "Rebekah, the little girl who slammed doors and perished miserably." And the little boy who played with guns and shot his sister.

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