The Narthex

With the scene of Father Damien collapsed after a strenuous hike, I have stopped the camera, so to speak, and three images come to my mind. The first is that of Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. After 16 days in an open boat on the high seas, including one day…

On October 6 and 8, the Ironman Triathlon will take place in Hawaii. In a contest that tests human endurance, the athletes, without taking breaks, will swim 2.4 miles in the open ocean, bike 112 miles, and run a marathon (26 miles). It has been held annually since 1978. I…

John Newton began his career as a slave trader. He abandoned the non-conformist Christian faith of his childhood, but the dying embers of his conscience eventually burst into flame again, fanned by the horrors of the trade, so that he turned his back on his past and became a leading…

Handsome and adventurous, John F. Kennedy Jr. fell into the self-destructive behavior of other men in the Kennedy clan. Fame and fortune have a way of corrupting the soul. In his late 30s, JFK Jr. decided to fulfill his persistent childhood wish to fly a plane. His mother begged him…

The part played by Christianity has been neither ancillary nor supplementary but literally essential, for western civilization has been Christian in its very essence. Those who would understand the West cannot sift the Christianity out of it. The honest unbeliever who is a serious student of history and culture will…

A read of the German synod documents reminds me that revisionists are keener on erasing than on building. But no one invited me. I did get invited to a mini-synod session by classmates from the minor seminary that I attended for six years. What led to the mini-synod was an…

I was on my early morning walk to preempt our record heat in San Diego when I spotted an elderly man and woman sweeping their metal detectors over a children’s playground. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and one knee pad. Stopping beside the woman, I asked, “Find anything?” “Little stuff…

When Soviet troops arrived at the Auschwitz complex on January 27, 1945, bewildered prisoners greeted them with tears and embraces, kissing the flaps of their overcoats and hugging their knees. Confused and surprised by the wretched conditions of the camp, the soldiers gruffly asked, “What are you all doing here?”…

Every act of faith, including prayer, terminates not in a proposition or an abstract concept but in the living God. We pray to Him. (In contrast, recall how in the secular realm we often hear, “Our thoughts and prayers are with you,” or we are exhorted to give thanks on…

In 2008, while I waited in traffic, I heard a horn beep and looked to see a "thumbs up" by a young driver. She was praising the sticker posted on my rear window: One Man, One Woman for Life. That was when Proposition 8, banning all homosexual marriages, was approved…

The number seven seems to have special status, as seen in mathematics, engineering science, natural history, psychology, and elsewhere. Our civilization counts seven continents, seven seas, seven wonders of the ancient world, and seven heavens. Western musical scales are composed of seven distinct notes that Pythagoras (c. 500 BC) studied…

The 13th-century invention of the mechanical clock dramatically changed the pace of civilization. "There are few greater revolutions in human experience," historian Daniel Boorstin writes, "than this movement from the seasonal or 'temporary' hour to the equal hour. Here was man's declaration of independence from the sun, a new proof…

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…

Many saints, performers of wondrous deeds, fortified themselves with silent, prayerful contemplation of infinite Truth -- all in their small, simple cells. Researchers and scientists like the famous inventors Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla also embraced privation, risk, and sacrifice. Much like the saints, they demonstrated the great faith that…

In the early church, reports of Christians healing the sick and raising the dead by prayer were accepted without skepticism or disbelief. In his five-volume series Against the Heresies, St. Irenaeus (c.130-220), Bishop of Lyons, writes, “Some persons that were dead have been raised again and have continued among us…