The Narthex

“All men by nature desire to know,” reads the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. A bit of clarification is in order. Not all of the many students I’ve taught wanted to know about this bold claim. For some (like Bubba in the back row) it’s TMI, too much information. And…

Being a college teacher was a pretty good job back in the good old days. Why? Because it was easy to know when students were cheating. Exams were a cinch. Students sitting in desks in a classroom seem to believe they are surrounded by a dome of invisibility, but the…

In last week’s Gospel, Jesus called Himself the “sheepgate,” the sole legitimate entrance to the sheepfold. In this week’s Gospel, St. Peter calls Jesus the “cornerstone.” He also calls Him a “stone that will make people stumble and a rock that will make them fall” (1 Pt 2:8, quoting Is…

Writing about the Gospel for this past Sunday, Fr. Paul Scalia pointed out something we might be prone to overlook: Jesus describes Himself not as the “Good Shepherd” but as the “sheep gate.”  “I am the gate for the sheep…  Whoever enters through me will be saved and will come…

Previously I described pairs or groups of people who experienced simultaneous mystical flights to God. Here I look at some saintly people about whom I hoped there might be evidence of simultaneous flight. Although the evidence does not support that, there's no doubt these holy men and women were devoted to…

The St. Augustine reading club to which I belong is reading the Confessions and we noted the mystical event he had with his mother, St. Monica. Perhaps you have seen the 1854 (or the 1845 original) painting held by the National Gallery, London, by Ary Scheffer of Saint Augustine and…

As befits an octogenarian, I’ve been known to say, “Back in the day…,” but now and again a wise guy asks, “Just when was that?” So, to be more precise, I’ll refer to “the halcyon days of yore.” Nowadays, sadly, it has fallen on me to come to the defense…

Monica Migliorino Miller’s article, “The Meaning of Feminine Submission” (Jan.-Feb.), deserves a grateful and respectful hearing because she takes Scripture seriously at the very place where many modern readers become either embarrassed by the text or eager to domesticate it into the moral language of the age. Her article succeeds…

A few days ago I was watching the boring stock market channel on TV in Japan when there appeared on the screen a commercial for an investment product. Not earth-shattering news, I know. But there was something about the commercial that threw me for a loop. The investment product, which…

On the night of April 14 and the early hours of April 15, 1912, the grandest ship on earth struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank in fewer than three hours, taking roughly 1,500 lives with her and drowning the proud language of an age in the frothy…

On August 9, 1943, Franz Jaegerstaetter was beheaded for refusing to serve in the German army. The March 2009 edition of New Oxford Review contains my article “Pope Benedict’s Surprise” -- the surprise being that Franz had been declared a martyr (on June 1, 2007) when the Nazis were not…

Even before the thrilling movie 300 (2006), many Westerners were familiar with the even more thrilling history of the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC). At the “hot gates,” the historical record tells us, Spartan king Leonidas I led his fellow Greeks against a much bigger invading force under “King of…

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…

A family member recently moved from a small town in Alabama to an even smaller town in the South Pacific. Worlds apart, you might think. Whole continents and oceans, and the infinite interplay of historical and cultural time, separate the land of the Cherokee syllabary and the Appalachian banjo from…

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…