The Narthex

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…

Monosodium glutamate, or MSG, was in just about everything at the Chinese restaurants I went to growing up. The idea of MSG is that it enhances, or is supposed to, the flavors already present in the dishes being prepared. A Japanese scientist named Ikeda Kikunae discovered MSG more than a…

Freedom fails when citizens demand the benefits of ordered liberty while refusing the virtue that gives liberty its moral spine. Our present disorder should surprise only those who believed a republic could survive after the home stopped forming conscience, the school stopped teaching wisdom, and the church was politely invited…

Yesterday I was absorbed in listening to Antonín Dvořák's Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104. It was the 1970 studio version, with Jacqueline du Pré as soloist and her husband, Daniel Barenboim, conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. There is also a famous live version from 1968, performed as a…

"A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of…