The Narthex

I cannot confirm this story, try as I might, but I recall that decades ago there occurred one of those sex scandals in the Australian Federal Parliament in which the alleged offender was turned on and savaged from all sides by his virtuous fellows. Until a venerable senior politician (I think…

We are urged to have serious conversations about race, and we should. In this post, gentle reader, I push a bit to make them more serious. Let’s bypass the cant of the major political parties. And let’s be on watch both for numbing inertia and for hijacked populism. Objectivity helps,…

During a Sunday morning walk in my lower middle-class neighborhood, I came across a City employee matching paint for a sidewalk wall which had been marked with graffiti. I asked him, not expecting an answer, “Why do kids do this?” “Maybe to feel important, to mark their territory like a…

The destruction of Edward Colston's statue in the English city of Bristol is perfectly understandable in one sense: slavery is a disgusting institution and the involvement and enrichment of Englishmen in that vile trade was utterly reprehensible. To their credit the British later led the world in the virtual eradication…

Context, like character, counts. Allow me to offer a context for the two weeks of protest marches in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. A blogpost has limits but is far preferable to a slogan or a meme. For a start, the murder took place in an ethos…

During my city engineering career, I mentored a young fellow worker. When he was a child, Michael—whom I nicknamed Grasshopper (Kung Fu)—had a narrow escape with his parents from Vietnam just before the Communists took over. He later graduated from UCSD and started working as a civil engineer. Back in…

On May 4, 1940, my father embarked on the first voyage of the Queen Mary, since her conversion to a troop ship, to sail to the Middle East to fight the Axis powers. On board were 5,000 other members of the AIF – the Australian Imperial Force. My mother, like…

“No more war, never again war.” So said Pope Paul VI at the United Nations, so says Pope Francis today. Yet there continue to be wars and rumors of war. Often political leaders encourage us to add to the patriotic gore. Just a few weeks ago, I joined an international…

A new article in The Atlantic, "The War Machine Is Run on Contracts" by Kathy Gilsinan, describes the largely unacknowledged thousands of people who make possible U.S. military activity in the Middle East. As U.S. interventions have become more complex ("nation building") and drawn-out over decades, our military has relied…

Ah, the things we ask! When we’re running late, as often we are, we ask what time it is. When something goes missing, as it often does, we ask where it is. Or suppose we have a tough decision to make. Then we ask how to weigh the contending pros…

Every generation complains about the shortcomings of its successors. Grievances about the state of “the world today” have filled the thoughts of the grumpy (aged and ageing) since time began. But there’s never been a time when all was well. Dickens said it so nicely: “It was the best of…

Berea College, in rural Kentucky, was founded in 1855 by a Christian minister. The private liberal arts work college is known, at least regionally, for providing free education to students and for having been the first college in the South to be co-ed and racially integrated. Since its beginning, Berea…

Most speeches, happily, are over when they are over. Once over, they get ignored. Not so Senator Marco Rubio’s recent “Common Good Capitalism.” The Senator chose The Catholic University of America as his venue, and he makes a decent effort to draw on Catholic Social Teaching. At its center, as…

Daniel Larison, over at The American Conservative, writes on the last 20 years of America’s wars of choice. In “The Costs Of Forever War: 335,000 Dead Civilians And $6.4 Trillion” he cites a recent study on post-9/11 wars and military action in the Middle East and Asia, published by the…

Portions of the U.S. have become like the “wild west,” and in many ways even worse than that. A CNN headline from earlier this year reads, “More US school-age children die from guns than on-duty US police or global military fatalities, study finds.” This blog post is not about being…