The Narthex

Sunday’s First Reading was Solomon’s prayer for wisdom and God’s generous response, pleased at what the young king had asked for. Wisdom in the Biblical tradition is not about knowledge or erudition; Solomon was not asking to be an Einstein. Wisdom is about how to live rightly, which in Israel’s…

Here in California, where there’s a good bit of dreaming, some dreams are nightmares. They feature earthquakes. The ill-starred San Andreas fault is likely to host the next mega-quake, the “big one.” As it happens, my family lives along the Inglewood-Newport Beach fault. The predictions for folks like us are…

My first encounter with the works and genius of Antoni Gaudí dates back almost 15 years, when my wife suggested a trip to Barcelona, ​​the city where almost a century earlier the architect had begun work on one of the last great cathedrals built in the West. I wasn't familiar…

For years during the early Twenties we heard about the “Biden Crime Family.” Shady dealings in Ukraine. Board memberships that reeked of pay-to-play implications. Personal enrichment for a scofflaw scion. Special treatment from the so-called Department of Justice. Another example of two-tiered courts in the USA. Right on to all…

I stood studying the labels on jars of tomato sauce. One promised Traditional Classic. Another claimed Authentic Italian. But it was the jar labeled Bone Marrow Sauce that caught my eye. I took it home with quiet hope and gave it a try, to no avail. Nothing came close to the sauce I…

A super typhoon, Bavi, strafed the Mariana Islands this month. It was the second one since Sinlaku in April. The winds and rains in both storms were almost unimaginable. The violence of the super typhoons would be difficult to exaggerate. Tinian, Saipan, and Rota have been hit especially hard. Guam,…

What are we to make of World Cup Soccer fans? They are legion, are they not? Indeed, they constitute a spectacle as they celebrate futbol, the beautiful game, at its highest level. Now and then I suspect they are cheering for themselves as much as for their teams. Wrapped in…

In 1960, in my sophomore year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, my machine shop grade was the only reason I didn’t receive high honors that semester. I swallowed my pride and begged the instructor to raise it to an A. My whole sense of self-worth seemed to depend on…

The quest for physical immortality is as old as the human race. Decrepit mummies in Egyptian deserts attest to the same doomed aspiration as ancient Chinese emperors who pickled their insides with cinnabar, hoping to outsmart death. Baseball ace Ted Williams’s head in cryogenic stasis, bobbing in liquified gas waiting…

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” -- attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas

If I were to follow the precepts laid down by the Blessed Doctor in the epigraph above, I would not have written…

Social media has managed to do what technology eventually does with the deepest regions of the human soul: turn reality into a public interface where sorrow can be uploaded, curated, and then monetized by systems that have absolutely no capacity to love the dead or heal the living. Grief used…

Many readers may be familiar with the term Anthropocene. It denotes an epoch of geological time during which human influence on the environment has become pronounced. Geologists, who apparently like to work as slowly as the processes they study, have, after laborious deliberation, largely rejected the use of Anthropocene as…

In Part 3 we looked at Pugin’s St. John the Baptist “Hospital,” Alton Castle, and Lodging for Stonemasons, all in Alton, as the first of Pugin’s built works that evidenced the social vision in his Contrasts. We continue. Pugin’s Home (“The Grange”) and St. Augustine’s Abbey Church, Ramsgate (1843-44) Pugin…

Before proceeding to the Block Universe Controversy, I’ll give some background material to make time, as a variable in space-time, intelligible in the context of relativity theory. If the reader finds sections of this article too challenging, please skim those sections but be sure to read the final section…

"For in him we live and move and have our being" is a stunning truth. It comes to us from Epimenides, the legendary ancient Greek poet. St. Paul cites it in his Mars Hill sermon to the searching and often skeptical Athenians (see Acts 17:28). The idiosyncratic Bishop George Berkeley…