The Narthex

It would be great if women who wanted to play basketball had a league of their own. They don’t, though. Instead, they have the WNBA, which is a political action committee doing layups and free throws. The difference between a women’s basketball league and the WNBA is, well, difference. A…

My paternal aunt is nearing 102 and I’m 84. We both have witnessed a staggering exponential advancement in technology and a depreciation of what it means to be human. We lived in the same three-story tenement in East Boston, not far from what was to become Logan International Airport. Before…

Hear ye, hear ye! President Trump opines that he is the most powerful person to ever live (“The YOLO Presidency,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2026). There are compelling reasons to dispute his claim. Even so, many of our politicians insist that the United States is the greatest country on earth.…

The Opening Prayer for the Eighteenth Sunday (A) in Ordinary Time asks that the Lord “may restore what you have created and keep safe what you have restored.” Let’s focus on the verb “restore.” "Restore” suggests something has lost some original characteristic, whose restoration recovers something valuable about that thing.…

Back in the mid-1980s, while working as a resident field engineer for the City of San Diego, I was overseeing a project that required the contractor to locate a buried cable beneath a city street. Instead of using the usual electromagnetic locator that induces a detectable current in the wire,…

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…