The Narthex

We at the Christopher Dawson Centre, in Australia, are looking forward to hosting a talk by Prof. Ian Plimer on Thursday April 21. He is a controversial and provocative climate scientist who questions the prevailing "narrative." After choosing the venue, a pub in central Hobart, and making the arrangements I…

In my gubernatorial campaign to challenge Gavin Newsom, I get lots of inquiries. Here’s one from the advocacy group Intact Political Action (IPA).

“Hello. If you are elected Governor of California, would you sign a bill banning non-therapeutic circumcision of boys if it came to your desk? Would…

June 7, 2022: Save the date! Truth be told, I don’t save most dates. This one’s different. It’s the date of the California Primary Election, and I’m running for Governor. Again. I was a candidate in last year’s Special Recall Election that induced Gavin Newsom, our (still) sitting governor, to…

Three old men tagging eighty years old, myself included, were in a conference call discussing the State of the Union. It didn’t matter to us what Biden, a fellow geezer, would say Tuesday night. We could guess what he’d talk about: youth drug addiction, failing infrastructure, corporate taxes, COVID, NATO,…

During a recent academic conference, one of the speakers dazzled the audience—or me, at least—by suddenly switching from perfect English to what sounded like perfect Sanskrit. Without missing a beat, he then interpreted the short Sanskrit phrase he had uttered: “The gods reside where the women are respected.”

It appears…

As we enter the third year of pandemic-driven fear, we need to take stock of the whole range of its consequences: deaths and hospitalizations certainly, but also lives broken by business failures, the cruelty of forcing isolation on dying people, abuse of authority, absurd and scientifically unfounded regulations, the craven…

When I was a 6th-grader walking home with friends from elementary school in the 50s, we would talk about all the interesting things heard in the news, like the Boston Braves leaving Boston or the first man to conquer Mt. Everest. We wondered what it was like to be Castro,…

As coverage of the March for Life 2022 winds down, I reflect that the mood in the pro-life movement seems very different now than ever before. I never attended the March for Life in Washington. But one year I did attend the smaller March for Life in Chicago. I remember…

Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME) missionaries run a news website called AsiaNews, which provides news briefs from Asia and around the world. A recent article called "Asia in 2022" (Jan. 1) offers a round-up of important events on the horizon for the enormous continent and its dominant player, China.…

Reporters at The New York Times have made public hundreds of confidential reports by the Pentagon on civilian casualties from U.S. air-strikes in Iraq and Syria, covering September 2014 through January 2018. The journalists describe the air-strikes as "marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the…

Ten days ago a student group, Women in Politics, hosted a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood of America. Loyola Marymount University (LMU) provided the venue. The University did so despite a nationwide protest and Los Angeles Archbishop Gomez’s expression of deep disappointment. In the sponsoring group’s estimation, the event—a semi-formal party…

A new article by Aleisha R. Brock and Simon Thornley, published at Science, Public Health Policy, & the Law (at publichealthpolicyjournal.com), re-analyzes data used in a CDC report and finds a high risk of miscarriage (also called spontaneous abortion) in early pregnancy after use of a COVID mRNA vaccine. A…

I recently returned from a visit to Perth. Western Australia and Tasmania are COVID-free “bubbles” and one is able to travel fairly freely between them (freely, that is to say, if you except the necessity of obtaining what amounts to a visa to pass from one state of the Commonwealth…

On Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's Life is Worth Living show of February 2, 1953 -- the episode entitled "The Death of Stalin" -- Sheen enacted Mark Antony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar, substituting Malenkov and Stalin as the two characters. “And now Malenkov speaks: ‘Friends, Soviets, countrymen, lend me your ears;…

Pope Francis meets and greets Nancy Pelosi. So it went last week. Then followed a practiced exchange of smiles. Since the devil is no respecter of persons, he was doubtless there as well. But our angels love us far more than the devil hates us, so we can hope that…