The Narthex

The Human Shield Dilemma I’ve long argued that the Church, and particularly the current pontificate, are derelict in not conducting serious discussions about just war theory and contemporary warfare (including the use of human shields and urban warfare). Failure to address these issues suggests what George Weigel has highlighted: a…

Germans are currently debating whether to lift their country's ban on donating female eggs. Germany and Luxembourg are the two EU countries that ban the practice. Can we donate the building blocks of human beings? If so, can we donate the humans themselves? Last April, The New York Times ran…

We need to change the subject in discussions about retirement from the economic (in)solvency of Social Security to the meaning and significance of retirement. My thoughts on this were sparked by a new book by Teresa Ghilarducci titled Work, Retire, Repeat. Her argument is that many people are working past…

Has our modern world made things that, for earlier generations came naturally, harder? And, in fact, do those things have to be harder? Tim Carney, author of Family Unfriendly, says there are contemporary changes in society that do make being a parent harder, both objectively (if kids don’t have sidewalks,…

Acts 4:32-35 speaks of the spiritual and temporal unity of the early Christian Church, exemplified in the common holding of property. The text no doubt makes visions of socialist sugar plums dance in some “social justice-plus” types' heads. I hate to wake them up from their dreams. The Church in…

Stage One: The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in Plymouth Colony in 1621. The Pilgrims set out for North America in September 1620. Storms put them off-course during their Atlantic crossing, to land farther north -- off present-day Massachusetts -- than they planned. Finding themselves in a wilderness at the start…

Cremation is a practice against which I regularly rail. I maintain that the Vatican’s 1963 relaxation of the ban on cremation by Catholics, as long as they didn’t resort to it to deny the resurrection of the body, was wrongheaded. Today’s Catholic cremator may not even think about “the resurrection…

The demise of a nation at the hand of its enemy is comprehensible. The demise of a nation by the aggregated poor choices of its own prosperous people is strange indeed. Christ warns of the pitfalls of wealth, of hearts set on money and not God. He says, in the…

Some ten years ago I was invited to what was billed as a “gender reveal.” It was a dinner at a local Italian restaurant, complete with dessert in the form of an iced cake, the pink or blue inside of which would reveal the sex of the host couple's unborn…

I learned in engineering economics that quantity diminishes quality when constrained by limited resources. Manufacturers, farmers, engineers, and artists are subject to that reality. It applies to all human endeavors. Examples of this are found in the produce aisle of your grocery store. Commercially-grown, gas-ripened fruits like apricots are bland…

At the NOR, few times are as exciting as when responses from a direct mail campaign start rolling in. It takes a while for the responses to start coming, but when they do the office staff knows we’re in for a wild ride. As most readers know, print magazines are…

The pet industry is reaping billions from modern man's spiritual desolation -- that sense of emptiness and disquiet that aches for remedy. As workaholism and an ever-higher cost of living moves people to delay or forego marriage and children, pets fill the void in their lives. It’s a sign of…

I was a candidate for the Trappist monastery, back in 1968. Personal pets were not allowed—an ancient discipline to enhance the inner companionship of God. Though written rules about pets were unlikely before the 13th century, Ancrene Wisse (Rule for Anchoresses) made it clear that a religious recluse should avoid…

California bureaucrats are aiming for more and more control over our lives—with no end in sight. A San Diego county government agency is proposing various options for a mileage tax, anticipating that more electric vehicles will reduce overall gas tax revenues -- currently 51 cents per gallon— by far the…

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…