The Narthex

Commands often raise my hackles. This one, though, is welcome. I’m for it! But not everyone is. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens reports that “at the first sound of ‘God bless you, merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!’ Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer…

The archetypical image of the forbidden fruit in Genesis is the apple. Neither a Delicious nor a Gala nor a Fuji―just a plain apple. East Indians see the forbidden fruit as a banana. What actually hangs from The Tree of Life is the temptation to partake of delicious pleasure without…

What Killed the Cat? Don’t blame the bloke who let the dogs out. Cats can run faster and climb higher. There’s another suspect. “Helter skelter, hang sorrow, care will kill a cat, up-tails all, and a pox on the hangman.” So wrote Ben Jonson in his 1598 play Every Man…

Self-government in the political sense is only successful when each member of society is able to govern himself.  That is, democracy only works when the people are virtuous.  This truth, which has long been forgotten, was ever on the minds of the Founders and was the reason behind John Adams’s…

Have you ever heard the protestation “There’s no such thing as a bad boy!” It’s what a doting grandmother might say, at least in Grand Rapids, Michigan. What did my grandmother really mean? Probably something like “There’s hope for him yet.” That was true, although it’s false that there’s no…

Friedrich Nietzsche once posited that the best way to defeat Christianity was to attack it not based on its truth but on its practical impossibility.  From its impracticality the world will draw its own conclusions regarding its veracity.  There is a certain diabolic deftness to an attack on this front…

Puzzles, especially real life puzzles, can drive us crazy. (When my dad was charged with doing this very thing, he’d reply “Sir/Madam, in your case it will be a short, quick trip.”) But puzzles can also lead to insight, and the harder the puzzle the more valuable the insight can…

Let’s list a few words: smart, clever, bright, ingenious. They’re all familiar. No one needs to make a pitch for aspiring to being smart, clever, bright, or ingenious. With “practical reason” we’re in a different territory. The term isn’t so familiar. It’s easy to confuse with “practicality.” And we can’t…

Pandemonium broke loose last Saturday night as the highly anticipated UFC 229 battle between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov spilled out of the octagon and a virtual riot ensued.  This is not the first time something like this has happened, although when even Mike Tyson calls a “fight riot” crazy it…

"When we see news clips of a shark swimming near a beach, it scares us into not going near that beach," says Liz Weinandy, a registered dietitian at Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center. But "what we should be scared of is double cheeseburgers, french fries and large amounts of…

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s he was struck by just how faithful Americans were to their “self-evident” credo that “all men are created equal.”  He was overwhelmed by the preponderance of what he called the “equality of conditions.”  Americans loved equality, so much so that…