The Narthex

Have you noticed how the liberal mainstream media has become awfully pro-war? This is a change from a generation ago. The Quincy Institute's Responsible Statecraft website now features "Day of reckoning for the media handmaidens of war" by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos. In it she recaps the change in the American…

Few today may remember the American actor and comedian George Burns. He died in 1996, at the age of exactly 100, a venerable doyen of the Vaudeville era. Never on stage without his signature cigar, he delighted generations with his arched eyebrow, gravelly voice, and pessimistic Jewish humor. My favorite…

I’ve often heard it said that “Life isn’t just.” Well, maybe. And maybe that’s why so many of us are keen on “free stuff.” But is there any? A Libertarian with whom I debate thinks that there’s lots of it. For a start, paying taxes should be optional. And if…

The phrase civil disobedience stirs up a whole range of reactions. We might think of Gandhi’s brave followers beaten to the ground in their serried ranks as they tried to break the salt monopoly, or Martin Luther King’s peace marchers, or of WWII resistance fighters in Greece, France, and Italy,…

The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at Brown University, has a "Costs of War" website which presents "U.S. Costs to Date for the War in Afghanistan, in $ Billions, 2001-2021" (published in April 2021). The cost in blood and treasure is immense. A link to the web page…

In the last week or so I’ve had two friends ask me the same hard question about evangelizing, though in different ways. What follows is how I answered them. If nothing else, I got some practice in answering questions that Catholics, as strangers in a strange land, need to address.…

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will top news headlines for days to come. As a supplement to those articles I offer two links containing perspectives not easily found in our mainstream media. The first is "As America’s Imperial Ambitions Collapse, Washington Should Ask: Who Lost Afghanistan?" by Doug Bandow (Antiwar.com,…

Employer mandates appear to be the next big thing in the pandemic-response saga. My 62-year-old sister, a registered nurse, had to have the jab to keep her job. She had no underlying illnesses, but within two months after getting vaxed she contracted near-death pericarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle). The…

Being conservative has very little to do with the political left or the political right. We at the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies are not right-wingers. Though some of our views might be characterized as right-wing, we hold many opinions that would commonly be regarded as more typical of…

A year and a half of COVID-time has passed, so it's time for a data update. All along some medical professionals have warned that the virus will be with us for a long time -- this much holds true. Putting aside the endless debates over lockdowns and masks, one cannot…

Today, crazy notions spread like wild fire and become wilder as they spread, often claiming the authority of science, and using the muscle of popular mass culture to cower most people into acquiescence, if not belief. We are indeed in the midst of a pandemic, but it’s much bigger than…

From time to time we need to take stock. The history of mankind has not a smooth progression, but more like a series of steps, sometimes short, sometimes long, separated by risers that may be shallow or dramatically steep. Looking backwards, we took many steps that now seem with hindsight…

On Sunday the U.S. conducted airstrikes in the Iraq-Syria border region. Judging from U.S. media coverage of it on Monday, the country had already yawned and moved on. By lunchtime both the Apple News and Google News aggregators showed one short news item each, way down in the scroll. One…

What to say about California? During the Gold Rush, it was “California or bust.” Later Horace Greeley upped the ante: “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” Greeley thought that the nation’s capital only offered high rents, lousy food, and bad morals. And wasn’t California…

As the pandemic crisis wanes for wealthy nations, the unintended consequences of worldwide economic shutdowns will continue to unfold for years in poorer parts of the globe. Two examples of this are found in two Church-affiliated news outlets. The first is a LiCAS News article, "Child labor rises to 160…