The Narthex

July 22 used to be a state holiday in Communist Poland marking the day that the traitors imported by the Soviet Army installed themselves in Lublin in 1944 as the “Provisional Government of National Unity” and would proceed, for the next 45 years, to torture Poland with their pretensions to…

On January 10, Pope Francis met with DIALOP, a group of "European leftist politicians and academics that seeks to bridge Catholic social teaching and Marxist theory.” The Pope encouraged “dialogue” with Marxism. “European leftist politicians and academics” can theorize over cappuccino and croissants about what Moscow has in common with…

Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky recently captured a headline in the Los Angeles Times. “Humans lack free will, says Stanford scientist” (10-22-2023, B1). The subtitle drives home the point: “Decades of study lead to claim that virtually all behavior is beyond our conscious control.” So contends Sapolsky, the winner of a MacArthur…

The November issue of Commentary, a monthly magazine of conservative Jewish thought, features a great essay, “Psalms They Have, But They Know Not.” Rabbi Meir Soloveichik ponders American Biblical ignorance, especially among its “educated,” and its implications. The immediate impetus for his article was an incident last summer on the…

October 16, 2023, marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the election of St. John Paul II as Pope. There are so many things about his 26-year pontificate for which we should be grateful, but I will focus on one I find particularly important: his Christian humanism. I am aware mention of…

Conservative defenders of traditional Christian values often claim that many of the things they perceive as current threats to society -- radical sex education in primary schools, for example, or the notion of gender fluidity -- share a common origin. That they are in fact inspired by Marxism, which is…

Ukraine’s ongoing attack from Russia is now entering its seventeenth month. Russia continues its aggression, in part because it knows Western attention spans can be short and eager to “move on.” There’s nothing Moscow would like better. As a Polish American, let me tell you: the Central European perspective is…

We’re used to “in your face” demonstrations, and so are Swedes. But now Sweden is dealing with something more, the public burning of the Quran. Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is furious: “The insult to the Holy Quran in Sweden is a bitter, conspiratorial, dangerous event. It is the opinion of…

We moderns hear a lot about miracles. Modern medicine is a miracle, we’re told. Landing rovers on Mars, or on distant asteroids, requires a miraculous degree of technological sophistication. Marvels—miracles’ kid brothers—are a dime a dozen in 2023. Video phones, space telescopes, ChatGPT. Wow. Aren’t we human beings special. Miraculous,…

Perhaps you have read of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021, and the kinds of images it has given us, like those of the “Stephan’s Quintet” (google "James Webb Space Telescope Stephan’s Quintet" to see it). And perhaps you have read of the findings of the…

As part of research for a separate project, I recently came across this ten-minute video about shell-shocked soldiers from World War I; it’s gut-wrenching but ought to be seen by everyone (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvTRJZGWqF8). It shows men twisted and deformed, body and mind, by the horror of war. I had…

I had recently finished reading Father Ian Ker’s biography of Cardinal John Henry Newman (who was beatified in 2010 and canonized in 2019) when a review in the Wall Street Journal of a book on the existence and nature of God by a professor of law at Yale caught my…

My friend and fellow NOR subscriber Kevin Doak shared with me a book by Dr. Alberto Martinez Piedra called No God, No Civilization: The New Atheism and the Fantasy of Perpetual Progress. The title is right up the alley of a hidebound reactionary like me. When many months later I…

Truth-telling dialogue has its hazards. Patience wears thin. Distractions can demonize. So it is, gentle reader, that I return, a bit aggravated, to the dialogue with my one-time mentor and longtime radical Karl Meyer. What we share, in varying ways, is the legacy of the Catholic Worker. I’m aggravated because…

My ongoing dialogue with Karl Meyer, once a mentor and always an independent radical, has hit a rough patch. In a recent note he tells me that all is not well. “I wonder how it is possible,” he asks, “to have an intelligent dialogue with a philosopher who posits a…