The Narthex

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…

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…

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…

Friedrich Nietzsche once posited that the best way to defeat Christianity was to attack it not based on its truth but on its practical impossibility.  From its impracticality the world will draw its own conclusions regarding its veracity.  There is a certain diabolic deftness to an attack on this front…

A lesbian couple in Texas has become the first such couple to give birth to a baby that they both carried.  Using a technique dubbed Reciprocal Effortless IVF, one of the women had several of her eggs fertilized while she acted as an incubator using a device called INVOCell.  After…

As reported in a number of news sources, there are now two separate “migrant caravans” heading towards the US-Mexico border, totaling about 10,000 migrants from Central American countries.  Their crawl to the border is like a slow fuse sure to reignite the contentious debate over immigration.  Protecting migrants is part…

In a presentation at the Gates Foundation's “Goalkeepers” last month, French President Emmanuel Macron made comments that appeared to be critical of large families: “One of the critical issues of African demography is that this is not chosen fertility... I always say: ‘Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly…

When Margaret Sanger attempted to attack the Church’s opposition to contraception, she did so mainly through anecdotal evidence of the thousands of mothers suffering under the burden of too many children.  She even went so far as to collect the stories of these women and bind them in a book…

Historical caricatures to the contrary, Martin Luther did not, at least initially, intend for the Protestant Revolution to happen.  Even a cursory glance at his 95 Theses shows them to be far from revolutionary (assuming papal authority, validity of indulgences, etc.) and more like propositions for debate.  The debate however…

Pandemonium broke loose last Saturday night as the highly anticipated UFC 229 battle between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov spilled out of the octagon and a virtual riot ensued.  This is not the first time something like this has happened, although when even Mike Tyson calls a “fight riot” crazy it…

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s he was struck by just how faithful Americans were to their “self-evident” credo that “all men are created equal.”  He was overwhelmed by the preponderance of what he called the “equality of conditions.”  Americans loved equality, so much so that…