The Narthex

The Gospel of the Second Sunday of Easter (Jn 20:19-31) incorporates two appearances by Jesus to His Apostles. His first, on Easter Sunday evening, is the institution of the sacrament of Penance, entrusting the ministry of forgiveness to His Apostles. The second, a week later, is when he confronts “doubting…

Roman Brandstaetter, the twentieth-century Polish author born into a highly observant Jewish family, always spoke of becoming Catholic not as a “conversion” but as a “fulfillment.” That perspective illumined his many religious writings, including his novella about the prophet Jonah. Brandstaetter’s Jonah was not the stiff-necked and somewhat simple man…

My parish owes heartfelt thanks to visiting priests from Africa. Not long ago, my pastor visited two of them in their home diocese in Uganda. While he was there, a controversy flared up. From what I could tell by parsing the news report, a government official there was levying a…

In his classic How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler, citing Francis Bacon, tells us that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Yes, but which books and in what order? Of the making of books there is --…

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, became its ex-president through the confluence of two factors, neither one of which seemed sufficient to remove her from office but, together, generated sufficient public (and, apparently, internal private donor) criticism to render her continued incumbency untenable. As you may remember, Gay was criticized for her…

This morning I left for work a little after the sun had risen -- not unusual with days shorter and clocks turned back one hour. As I walked across my parking lot, a couple of squirrels were busy on the old oak tree, about whose acorns pelting my window pane…

Classical literature, unlike today’s invasive shlock, offers us a legacy of rich moral reflections. Two related instances come to mind. Both make insightful judgments about our sorry attempts at self-deception, both personal and societal. In his haunting novella The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), Leo Tolstoy points out how often…

A New Thack(eray) on the Dumbing Down of Reading and Culture In a recent Facebook post, Joe Bottum commented on a 1915 lecture in which the speaker threw around multiple literary allusions to William Makepeace Thackeray’s characters as if they were obvious to everyone. Truth is, a lot of them…

My last post introduced the novel Mr. Blue. Here I'll look at author Myles Connolly's life. Connolly was born in 1897 in Roxbury, outside Boston. He attended Boston Latin School. At Boston College he edited the literary magazine The Stylus (founded in 1882 and still extant). After his 1918 graduation,…

In 1928 Myles Connolly published his 120-page debut novel, Mr. Blue. This book and author come to mind at this time of year because the protagonist, J. Blue, was in awe of the Incarnation, and also because Connolly was an adviser to film director Frank Capra for the Christmas-time favorite…