The Narthex

The other day I had a chance, via Skype, to have a conversation about what people really want. The conversation was with some friends from the American Solidarity Party and a young socialist working on his Ph.D. If one “average” question leads to another, our question—what do people really want?—led…

No man is an island, nor can any country stand alone. If as “outsiders” we are to be of any help in overcoming Venezuela’s tragedy, we have some hard thinking to do. And since we are human beings, what and how we think is intertwined with our emotions and imagination.…

Former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Gerhard Cardinal Müller issued a "Manifesto of Faith" last week.  Many within the Church hailed the document as both necessary and timely.  Others responded less positively, attacking his manifesto as animated by a spirit of division and comparing him…

In an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes, one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence, Kai Fu Lee, predicted that within 15 years robots and associated technologies will displace about 40% of the jobs in the world.  We might quibble over the actual percentage or the rapidity at which…

"The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive!" So read an outsize banner hanging in the gymnasium at an Institution of Higher Earnings. Once upon a time I taught there. From the start, the banner’s placement gave me pause. Is the idea that the fitter the student the greater is…

2018 will be hard to forget. TV specials remind us of “revolting developments” that we’d rather forget. Never mind! Most of us are full of resolve, and other things as well. Por ejemplo, frijoles. To send the old year on its way, I bought a new broom. Maybe it will…

Always and everywhere we have high hopes, and they reflect the Birth of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! In our time and place we have particular hopes because of special people -- ordinary people doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways. Last week I met one of them, thanks to…

Most crimes are petty. Shop lifting, for instance, spikes over the holiday season. Maybe crimes of passion do so as well. They’re the result of “affairs,” formerly spoken of as adultery and fornication. Some crimes are heinous, and they make the front page. Last week a serial killer confessed to…

In his prescient dystopic novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley foretells a time when children are mass produced in a laboratory using what he calls the Bokanovsky Process.  This process ensures the stability of Huxley’s World State because it genetically conditions the children into each of five social castes.  While…

In a 2014 address to representatives of the International Association of Penal Law, Pope Francis announced his crusade for abolishing capital punishment world-wide. His march would continue until August of this year when he ordered a revision to Catechism paragraph 2267 deeming the death penalty “inadmissible.” While a change to…

You may recall New Oxford Review’s story of a Providence College student named Michael Smalanskas, who bravely confronted politically-correct college administrators over his display about traditional Church teaching on marriage (see “The New Hate Speech: Catholic Teaching at a Catholic College,” May 2018; link here: https://www.newoxfordreview.org/documents/the-new-hate-speech-catholic-teaching-at-a-catholic-college/). Now it’s another…

As reported in a number of news sources, there are now two separate “migrant caravans” heading towards the US-Mexico border, totaling about 10,000 migrants from Central American countries.  Their crawl to the border is like a slow fuse sure to reignite the contentious debate over immigration.  Protecting migrants is part…

In the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings, her supporters exhorted us to “Believe Women.” That phrase became a rallying cry against sexual assault generally and Kavanaugh specifically. What does it mean to “Believe Women”? In its most basic sense, it means that we…