The Narthex

November is the month dedicated to prayer for the faithful departed. Many Catholics visit cemeteries during November. For that reason I want to share Father Józef Tischner’s reflections on cemeteries, found in the just-released translation of one of his seminal works, The Philosophy of Drama. Tischner is most known as…

A respected, and now suspected, newspaper once pledged to give subscribers “All the news that’s fit to print.” Today, that same paper violates its pledge both by commission and omission. Time for a new slogan? Here’s a suggestion: “All the propaganda that will fit.” And yet I read the rag,…

Hannah Arendt contended, and controversially, that the source of what she called “the banality of evil” is that people simply don’t, and won’t, think. The resultant evil is endemic under totalitarian and autocratic regimes. It’s only commonplace under liberal and quasi-democratic and bureaucrat institutions! But this sorry state of affairs…

Some of my best friends are grumpy old men. So the question arises: Can they be saints? Let’s hope so. Keep in mind, gentle reader, that not so long ago a concerned lady, a scholar of note, asked me whether the NOR itself had fallen into the hands of grumpy…

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his important book After Virtue, suggests what the world needs today is “another -- doubtless very different -- Saint Benedict.” Some might argue that Pope Benedict XVI was that new “Benedict” speaking to the modern world. I’d like to suggest what the world needs today is a…

David French is one of a particular species of pundit, one who likes to trade on the gases of his erstwhile conservative credentials while reliably ending up where good liberals are expected to be. It was that imitation of the Colossus of Rhodes’ straddle that initially led to his famous…

We’re told that it’s for “religious reasons” that someone opposes abortion. And it’s for “religious reasons” that someone opposes euthanasia. So we read in, for example, newspapers of record like the L.A. Times. What we don’t read, of course, is that someone opposes the policy of nuclear deterrence for religious…

Even Alasdair MacIntyre, among the greatest of living Thomists, thinks that believers might do better to argue from justice rather than to appeal to human dignity. And Harvard’s Steven Pinker writes derisively of the “stupidity of dignity.” Critics admit that the rhetoric of dignity surfaces in the United Nations Universal…

Over 65 years ago Karol Wojtyła wrote on “The Significance of Obligation.” In that text, Wojtyła probed the universal human experience of obligation -- “I ought to do X” -- asking what it tells us about itself. That experience teaches us three things: about obligation itself, about responsibility, and about…

In Catholic circles the concept of natural law is fairly familiar. I say “fairly” because I’m not sure that many Catholics could give an account of what natural law is. I’m even less sure that many Catholics could draw on natural-law thought when, and if, they enter debates in the…

When sorely pressed, my mother often said, “Let’s put it all in God’s hands.” Such was the path to peace. But of what sort? Friends of the indefatigable socialist Norman Thomas often commented that he never lost his capacity for outrage. But to what end? Of late, both Mom’s adage…

Change is a constant, with mixed results. But so, too, is a grim stasis, a permanent condition in this Vale of Tears. With regard to change, the players surely change. In St. Augustine’s time, the Roman Empire still held sway, though invaders from the North stormed its borders and sought…

“Thought blockers,” I call them. Right, left, conservative, reactionary, and progressive, they get in the way of the real discussion of real issues. They are elastic terms that could mean just about anything or almost nothing. Still, my caveat is prudential rather than absolute. So, I’m going into the deep…

The L.A. Times, a newspaper that I love to lambaste, seems to have a crack in its “wokeness wall.” A fresh editorial headline announces that “Students lose when colleges trade humanities for STEM” (Nov. 26). But wait! Science, tech, engineering, and math programs (STEM) now rule the academic roost. Is…

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…