The Narthex

Today, crazy notions spread like wild fire and become wilder as they spread, often claiming the authority of science, and using the muscle of popular mass culture to cower most people into acquiescence, if not belief. We are indeed in the midst of a pandemic, but it’s much bigger than…

I was raised in a household that had few pets: a fish that lasted about a year, a cat that wound up moving in with the neighbors, and another cat that I insisted on adopting and then promptly left when I moved away for college six months later. Ours…

The summer of 1969, an itinerant Hatha Yoga instructor gave me a ride to Guadalajara, Mexico. Fred was in his seventies but amazingly agile at performing difficult yoga postures for awestruck audiences of retired seniors. We were traveling south on I-25 through New Mexico, a few miles west of the…

From time to time we need to take stock. The history of mankind has not a smooth progression, but more like a series of steps, sometimes short, sometimes long, separated by risers that may be shallow or dramatically steep. Looking backwards, we took many steps that now seem with hindsight…

“Going my way?” Well, not yet. Sooner or later, though. Our word obituary comes from the Latin obire, which means “to go toward.” Many of us read the “obit” when someone famous dies. In such cases the obit was written soon after that someone became famous. That’s standard for the…

Every year we hear the same readings, the same parables, the same analogies: sheep & shepherds; seeds & sowers; vines, branches, weeds & farmers; coins, talents & those who don’t know what to do with them. As we slowly progress through life each parable takes on new meaning as we…

Pop quiz: Which major ecclesial body recently described itself as a “trans” church? Need a hint? This ecclesial body is a former state church, and with 5.9 million members is the largest denomination in that nation. Stumped? We’re talking about the Church of Sweden, an Evangelical Lutheran body and the…

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Colonel Pyncheon, a Puritan, covets a piece of land that a poor farmer owns. He has him hanged as a wizard so he can seize the old man’s property and build his seven-gabled mansion. At the gallows, Matthew Maule casts a generational…

On Sunday the U.S. conducted airstrikes in the Iraq-Syria border region. Judging from U.S. media coverage of it on Monday, the country had already yawned and moved on. By lunchtime both the Apple News and Google News aggregators showed one short news item each, way down in the scroll. One…

In the late sixties, I stayed a weekend at a Bruderhof and then hoped to experience the Shaker version of Heaven on Earth that Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and Ralph Waldo Emerson had much admired. But I was late by about 100 years, for in 1968 their numbers had dwindled…

What to say about California? During the Gold Rush, it was “California or bust.” Later Horace Greeley upped the ante: “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” Greeley thought that the nation’s capital only offered high rents, lousy food, and bad morals. And wasn’t California…

The early Church fathers were a tough and uncompromising lot. They had to be. Sharp-tongued St. Jerome wouldn’t have done well in the diplomatic service, or even made it past the interview; he bitterly attacked heretical enemies and wasn’t always very nice to his friends. St. Ignatius of Antioch was…

As the pandemic crisis wanes for wealthy nations, the unintended consequences of worldwide economic shutdowns will continue to unfold for years in poorer parts of the globe. Two examples of this are found in two Church-affiliated news outlets. The first is a LiCAS News article, "Child labor rises to 160…

In 1944, my father worked as an apprentice electrician at Bethlehem Steel’s East Boston facility, one of eighteen American shipyards that built 2,710 Liberty Ships as supply transports for WWII. Between 1941 and 1945 the facility cranked out three ships every two days. By the next year my father was…

From time to time, I’ve told people that outrage is the proper response to the outrageous. After all, ignoring the outrageous would be an outrage, wouldn’t? And it’s outrageous that we so often ignore the outrages of the day. Sounds plausible, or at least it did to me. But I…