The Narthex

One would think the hubris of Pope Francis knows no bounds, as he proposes we reinterpret and reword The Lord's Prayer. I suppose he thinks we have the wrong idea that God is purposely testing our worthiness. So? Maybe God is allowing all his children to be tempted. Ponder while…

A recent poll revealed that almost one-third of Americans and Brits are in favor of “rebranding” Santa Claus.  Santa 2.0 might wear sneakers instead of his trademark boots or he might become she or it, with 27% of respondents favoring either gender neutralizing him or making him a woman.  Christian…

Last week a young activist for whom I have sympathy wrote that he was hesitant to discuss democracy. Why so? Because he looks at democracy "differently." Democracy, he thinks, is only a tool to secure good leadership. But tools don’t always work. That’s why, he notes, once a party wins…

When I was a kid, coffee was served only to adults at our dinner table. Smoking was definitely a no-no, so we had to leave the dining room if a guest lit up a cigar. Even profanity was prohibited in our presence. The reason, of course, was that these would…

In The World’s First Love, Fulton Sheen draws attention to the timing of the definition of the Immaculate Conception.  The first televangelist sees in Pope Pius IX’s declaration a certain prophetic character that stood in stark contrast to the spirit of the times.  Fueled by Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, and Mill, the…

For some decades now my “home town” has been Guess Where, California. My plan is to keep it that way. These days, though, I’m singing the blues about the place. So why sing the blues, especially during the Christmas season? Because democracy is winding down. Now, it’s not dead yet.…

Most crimes are petty. Shop lifting, for instance, spikes over the holiday season. Maybe crimes of passion do so as well. They’re the result of “affairs,” formerly spoken of as adultery and fornication. Some crimes are heinous, and they make the front page. Last week a serial killer confessed to…

In his prescient dystopic novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley foretells a time when children are mass produced in a laboratory using what he calls the Bokanovsky Process.  This process ensures the stability of Huxley’s World State because it genetically conditions the children into each of five social castes.  While…

Commands often raise my hackles. This one, though, is welcome. I’m for it! But not everyone is. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens reports that “at the first sound of ‘God bless you, merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!’ Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer…

The archetypical image of the forbidden fruit in Genesis is the apple. Neither a Delicious nor a Gala nor a Fuji―just a plain apple. East Indians see the forbidden fruit as a banana. What actually hangs from The Tree of Life is the temptation to partake of delicious pleasure without…

What Killed the Cat? Don’t blame the bloke who let the dogs out. Cats can run faster and climb higher. There’s another suspect. “Helter skelter, hang sorrow, care will kill a cat, up-tails all, and a pox on the hangman.” So wrote Ben Jonson in his 1598 play Every Man…

In a 2014 address to representatives of the International Association of Penal Law, Pope Francis announced his crusade for abolishing capital punishment world-wide. His march would continue until August of this year when he ordered a revision to Catechism paragraph 2267 deeming the death penalty “inadmissible.” While a change to…

Remember the drill? Which of these things does not belong? Example #1 (apple, banana, carrot). Easy! A carrot isn’t a fruit, so it doesn’t belong. Example # 2 (cat, dog, butterfly). Well, a butterfly isn’t a mammal, so it doesn’t belong. The logical point in each example is that the…

Self-government in the political sense is only successful when each member of society is able to govern himself.  That is, democracy only works when the people are virtuous.  This truth, which has long been forgotten, was ever on the minds of the Founders and was the reason behind John Adams’s…

Pope Francis is humanely concerned with over a dozen man-made problems that even school kids would wonder why the world doesn’t do something about: plastics littering the oceans, deadly drug gangs in Mexico, insane wars sparked by the pride of men, murderous Christian persecutions in Muslim nations, materialistic culture and…