The Narthex

The grand narrative of human space flight to the planet Mars stretches across my entire life, woven together by a bizarre chain of historical and personal milestones. As a child, I loved munching on the original Mars candy bars. They were wrapped in glittering foil that caught the sunlight like…

When graduates of New York University booed Jonathan Haidt at Yankee Stadium on May 14, and a smaller group walked out during his commencement address, they offered a rather generous public demonstration of the exact civic immaturity he has spent years describing. Reporting from Forbes described the above actions, and…

In 1776 it was a stockade against the coming Redcoats; in the 1950s, a fallout shelter against Soviet missiles. The form changes, but the psychology does not. Both respond to the same ancient fear: How do I protect myself from uncertainty, loss, suffering, and death? In 1953, when I was…

Of late, there is an epidemic of excitement. Commerce crackles with it. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is, respectively, so excited to be the new realtor in the neighborhood, the new car dealer in town, or the new sales chief for Gizmo, Inc. But wait! Every Tess, Kate, and Sally…

On March 6, 1981, Walter Cronkite concluded his final broadcast as anchor of CBS Evening News, and with that quiet farewell a chapter of American media culture gently closed. For nearly two decades, his voice entered millions of living rooms every evening with calm pacing, measured language, and disciplined restraint…

When millions of pages of documents and photographs were released revealing who among the world’s so-called “elite” had been cavorting with sex-trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, many of those whose names and faces appeared in the caches scrambled to control the damage. Lawrence Summers, for example, who once swayed world economic…

We are constantly flooded with stimuli -- so much so that we often fail to notice when seemingly unrelated developments share a common logic. Consider two recent pieces in The New York Times. In one, Oren Cass criticizes what he calls “financialization”: an economy increasingly devoted not to producing goods…

Amazon has produced a docudrama on the First Lady, Melania. You might love it or hate it (or, like me, haven't seen it) but promotion of an incumbent First Lady is not uncommon. If you doubt it, ask how many times Vogue featured Jill Biden on its front cover --…

The image of a bride exchanging rings with a figure floating inside augmented reality glasses appears at first glance as a novelty item suited for a slow news cycle, and many readers understandably smirk and scroll on. Nevertheless, when Yurina Noguchi, a 32-year-old Japanese woman, donned a wedding dress and…

Those who read the Bible’s wisdom books know that they deal a lot with the quotidian: when to speak and when to shut up, how to conduct one’s self publicly, how to win friends and influence people. No surprise there, and sapiential literature was not unique to Israel. It was…

What’s happened to the cheap, sensational booklets called “penny dreadfuls,” and to detective fiction? Penny dreadfuls, for a start, have evolved, big time. How so? G. K. Chesterton, we recall, champions them. His “In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” (1901) calls them “The center of a million flaming imaginations.” He presents…

Time magazine fulminated this month about the rise of the trillionaires. In October, the Brookings Institute deep-dived into the rise of stablecoins. The Economist gave us their thoughts on the rise of singlehood. Straight Arrow News had a think piece on the rise of “Kirkifying” in the wake of the…

In recent days, during a Mass dedicated to children, a parish priest in Italy uttered remarks that left many faithful disconcerted:

Let me say first up: it's not a sin if you have a Halloween party on October 31st. It's not a sin, even if some idiots say…

I recently wrote about how what were once considered food waste products have increasingly hit the grocery market. My inspiration was last Sunday’s First Reading, in which the prophet Amos excoriated the commercial cheats of ancient Israel, specifically, his comment about selling “the refuse of the wheat” as food. But…

The assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 12 on a college campus in Utah, supposedly by a 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson who shot him in a single shot with a sniper rifle from approximately 200 meters, is not just the tragic end of a 31-year-old conservative activist, husband, and father…