The Narthex

“If memory serves,” I sometimes say, which puts my wife on alert. Is my selective amnesia (from the Greek ἀ-  "without" and μνήσις "memory") about to kick in? Maybe, but even so I’m the family archivist. Blimey! Who gets assigned to foraging in our archives, fittingly located in the shed…

Last week a gang of thieves shot and killed a fellow parishioner. The thugs were stripping the catalytic converter from a car, and he’d tried to stop them. At Sunday’s liturgy, our pastor spoke about the terrible loss and grief of the victim’s family. Many people in the congregation had…

Does charity begin at home? The short answer to the question is yes, it surely does. But the answer is controversial. In part, that’s because a short answer often calls for a careful explanation and we don’t provide it. Sometimes we’ve filed it where we can’t find it. That’s alright,…

Wittgenstein, in his early Tractatus, concludes his remarks with the proposition "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Many took him to mean that we can only speak of that for which there is empirical evidence or that which is simply tautological. If that were so, could we…

The more we know, the more we don’t know. It takes a lot of living to recognize our peculiar predicament. Even so, there are dissenters. Skeptics say that we don’t know what we think we do. Ideologues insist that they know what they don’t know. But why is it that…

How much does logic matter? It matters greatly if we are to love God with our whole heart, our whole soul, and our whole mind. But does logic matter to God? Rene Descartes was skeptical. In replying to critics, he contended that “God could have brought it about … that…

A colleague claims that time spent playing chess is time wasted. Nay, sir, I respond, “Chess is an art disguised as a game.” Golly, I’ve been playing chess since middle school. Game or art, it can be a source of delight and dismay. In recent days, I’ve been following the…

Things sometimes appear in social media seemingly out of nowhere, though one suspects they surface as “click-bait” created to generate readers’ reactions. That’s what I thought on Sunday when my X.com feed resurfaced a talk by National Public Radio chief executive Katherine Maher (her talk is linked below). The video…

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…