Catholic Writer and Biographer Joseph Pearce to Speak at 2018 Commencement
This May, Wyoming Catholic College will host friends and supporters from around the country for Commencement Week—a three-day event celebrating the academic achievements of the members of the Class of 2018. The week will conclude with Commencement, and as is always the case, the highlight of that occasion will be the talk delivered by our commencement speaker.
The College is honored to announce this year’s speaker: Joseph Pearce, the renowned Catholic biographer and literary professor. “Our mission at Wyoming Catholic College is to serve the remaking of culture,” said Dr. Glenn Arbery, the College’s president. “And Joseph Pearce is a champion of genuine Catholic renewal. He gravitates toward great heroes of the tradition and brings before a contemporary audience the most vital achievements of the Catholic Revival and the Christian imagination.”
A native of England, Joseph Pearce is a senior fellow at The Cardinal Newman Society and editor of its journal, as well as a senior contributor at The Imaginative Conservative, senior editor at the Augustine Institute, editor of the St. Austin Review, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, and executive director of Catholic Courses. The internationally acclaimed author of many books, Mr. Pearce is most famous for his biographies of modern Christian literary figures, including such bestsellers such as The Quest for Shakespeare, Tolkien: Man and Myth, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, C. S. Lewis and The Catholic Church, Literary Converts, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile and Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. His books have been published and translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Italian, Korean, Mandarin and Polish. He has participated and lectured at a wide variety of international and literary events at major colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Europe, Africa and South America, has hosted two 13-part television series about Shakespeare on EWTN, has written and presented documentaries on EWTN on the Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings, and is a regular guest on national and international television and radio programs.
This will not be Pearce’s first visit to Lander (and Wyoming Catholic). In December of 2009, he delivered one of the College’s four annual lectures, speaking on “The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome” in a talk that was warmly received by the entire College community. Much has changed in the intervening years, not least the College’s size; we enrolled our largest Freshman class ever this Fall, and this year’s student body is also our largest to date. But we are confident that the quality of Mr. Pearce’s remarks and the warmth with which they are received will remain constant. The Wyoming Catholic College community looks forward to his visit in May with great enthusiasm.
