The Narthex

My 15-year-old Royal Apricot tree died last year. It had borne the nectar of the gods. Taking an axe to its roots, I mourned as if a beloved monarch had passed on. I closed my eyes in memoriam to savor once again the rich harmonics of its flavorful, exotic fruits.…

My vegetable garden is a 4 x 10 planter box with gopher-proof screening and a weed-banning cloth. Its soil is enriched with root enzymes and minerals, wriggly worms, and rich humus. I nearly broke my back constructing it, but it was worth the anguish. I’ve got international participation from healthy,…

It’s been over 50 years since I taught physics and math ― not the most popular subjects, compared to hands-on training in auto mechanics at a vocational trade school in Beacon Hill. My young students were a rambunctious lot, shooting spit balls and flying paper planes when I entered to…

Cardinal Marx has called for "new thinking" on sexual issues, including celibacy. His liberal perspective reflects pressure to end mandatory priestly celibacy, a contested issue since sexual freedom has become a core principle of modern German culture. Catholics there have become skeptical of celibacy. Last November, the lay Central Committee…

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…

One would think the hubris of Pope Francis knows no bounds, as he proposes we reinterpret and reword The Lord's Prayer. I suppose he thinks we have the wrong idea that God is purposely testing our worthiness. So? Maybe God is allowing all his children to be tempted. Ponder while…

For some decades now my “home town” has been Guess Where, California. My plan is to keep it that way. These days, though, I’m singing the blues about the place. So why sing the blues, especially during the Christmas season? Because democracy is winding down. Now, it’s not dead yet.…

Commands often raise my hackles. This one, though, is welcome. I’m for it! But not everyone is. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens reports that “at the first sound of ‘God bless you, merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!’ Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer…

The archetypical image of the forbidden fruit in Genesis is the apple. Neither a Delicious nor a Gala nor a Fuji―just a plain apple. East Indians see the forbidden fruit as a banana. What actually hangs from The Tree of Life is the temptation to partake of delicious pleasure without…

What Killed the Cat? Don’t blame the bloke who let the dogs out. Cats can run faster and climb higher. There’s another suspect. “Helter skelter, hang sorrow, care will kill a cat, up-tails all, and a pox on the hangman.” So wrote Ben Jonson in his 1598 play Every Man…

Self-government in the political sense is only successful when each member of society is able to govern himself.  That is, democracy only works when the people are virtuous.  This truth, which has long been forgotten, was ever on the minds of the Founders and was the reason behind John Adams’s…

Have you ever heard the protestation “There’s no such thing as a bad boy!” It’s what a doting grandmother might say, at least in Grand Rapids, Michigan. What did my grandmother really mean? Probably something like “There’s hope for him yet.” That was true, although it’s false that there’s no…

Friedrich Nietzsche once posited that the best way to defeat Christianity was to attack it not based on its truth but on its practical impossibility.  From its impracticality the world will draw its own conclusions regarding its veracity.  There is a certain diabolic deftness to an attack on this front…

Puzzles, especially real life puzzles, can drive us crazy. (When my dad was charged with doing this very thing, he’d reply “Sir/Madam, in your case it will be a short, quick trip.”) But puzzles can also lead to insight, and the harder the puzzle the more valuable the insight can…