The Narthex

Transparency is important. Interested in the latest batch of election returns? In California, the Secretary of State posts them in real time. Concerned about what Rome’s doing with the yearly Peter’s Pence collection? An audit is in order, isn’t it? Wondering about what Corporate is concocting? Try lobbying for more…

Have you noticed how the liberal mainstream media has become awfully pro-war? This is a change from a generation ago. The Quincy Institute's Responsible Statecraft website now features "Day of reckoning for the media handmaidens of war" by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos. In it she recaps the change in the American…

I looked at the wall clock in our kitchen and saw both a large and small hand pointing straight up at an odd symbol. At five years old, I had an idea it meant food when the hands overlapped there. Whenever that happened, Mom would tell me it’s lunchtime. Now,…

Few today may remember the American actor and comedian George Burns. He died in 1996, at the age of exactly 100, a venerable doyen of the Vaudeville era. Never on stage without his signature cigar, he delighted generations with his arched eyebrow, gravelly voice, and pessimistic Jewish humor. My favorite…

Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco continues his bold leadership on issues of national importance with a Sunday op-ed in the Washington Post (September 5). In "Our duty to challenge Catholic politicians who support abortion rights," Cordileone says bishops must call out the "self-professed" Catholic politicians who are "on the wrong…

Yesterday I saw a black toy car about the size of a shoe box with 3-inch tires zip around the street, zigzagging, bucking, and avoiding curbs and bushes. Then I spotted a young boy remotely operating it, using an electronic device with his thumbs, signaling that plastic beast what to…

I’ve often heard it said that “Life isn’t just.” Well, maybe. And maybe that’s why so many of us are keen on “free stuff.” But is there any? A Libertarian with whom I debate thinks that there’s lots of it. For a start, paying taxes should be optional. And if…

The phrase civil disobedience stirs up a whole range of reactions. We might think of Gandhi’s brave followers beaten to the ground in their serried ranks as they tried to break the salt monopoly, or Martin Luther King’s peace marchers, or of WWII resistance fighters in Greece, France, and Italy,…

The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at Brown University, has a "Costs of War" website which presents "U.S. Costs to Date for the War in Afghanistan, in $ Billions, 2001-2021" (published in April 2021). The cost in blood and treasure is immense. A link to the web page…

Today when someone says Amazon, most think of the gargantuan retailer with tributaries throughout the world. But of course it's named after the Amazon River in South America, the world’s second longest river with 1,000 tributaries fertilizing Earth’s largest drainage basin. During the dry season, the Amazon's width reaches a…

In the last week or so I’ve had two friends ask me the same hard question about evangelizing, though in different ways. What follows is how I answered them. If nothing else, I got some practice in answering questions that Catholics, as strangers in a strange land, need to address.…

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will top news headlines for days to come. As a supplement to those articles I offer two links containing perspectives not easily found in our mainstream media. The first is "As America’s Imperial Ambitions Collapse, Washington Should Ask: Who Lost Afghanistan?" by Doug Bandow (Antiwar.com,…

Employer mandates appear to be the next big thing in the pandemic-response saga. My 62-year-old sister, a registered nurse, had to have the jab to keep her job. She had no underlying illnesses, but within two months after getting vaxed she contracted near-death pericarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle). The…

Being conservative has very little to do with the political left or the political right. We at the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies are not right-wingers. Though some of our views might be characterized as right-wing, we hold many opinions that would commonly be regarded as more typical of…

In Matthew 19:12 Christ suggests His male disciples may want to make themselves (figurative) eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. In Orthodox Jewish culture, men are expected to obey God’s directive to reproduce and sire offspring; Jewish women still judge barrenness a stigma. Why would Christ incur…