The Narthex

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…

Our neighborhood still has mail -- mostly ads -- hand-delivered by a robust man in his sixties with whom I occasionally chat. He’s an intelligent man whose astute and informative perspective makes for lively conversations. For three weeks, someone had replaced him. Yesterday, I was glad to see Joe was…

During its early history, the Christian church safeguarded the doctrine of the Holy Trinity by deeming deviant beliefs such as Montanism, Arianism, and Pelagianism as heresies. Even today, certain denominations such as Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostals reject the Holy Trinity. Jews and Muslims consider any belief beyond monotheism as…

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…

Hypocrisy is the offence that Christians are most often charged with. It is a powerful and effective cudgel to beat them over the head because it appears to be self-evidently true: everyone can give you examples of Christians behaving badly, now and throughout history. The charge is immediately persuasive 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,…

I learned in engineering economics that quantity diminishes quality when constrained by limited resources. Manufacturers, farmers, engineers, and artists are subject to that reality. It applies to all human endeavors. Examples of this are found in the produce aisle of your grocery store. Commercially-grown, gas-ripened fruits like apricots are bland…

In the last scene of one of Shakespeare’s grimmest tragedies, King Lear, by now an old and broken man, weeps for his dead daughter Cordelia:

No, no, no life? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou'lt come…

Truth-telling dialogue has its hazards. Patience wears thin. Distractions can demonize. So it is, gentle reader, that I return, a bit aggravated, to the dialogue with my one-time mentor and longtime radical Karl Meyer. What we share, in varying ways, is the legacy of the Catholic Worker. I’m aggravated because…

Kinoshita Tatsuya is a poet. He has published several books and has appeared on a cultural program on NHK radio called “Bungei Senpyō,” where amateur poets from throughout Japan send in their verse to be shared and discussed by literary figures. In January of this year, I read about Kinoshita…

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…

At age 12, I was rushed home from camp with pain in my abdomen. The family physician drove to our house and palpated my innards. He was a general practitioner who could read signs of ill health in ridged fingernails, bags under the eyes, and a beefy red tongue. That…

My ongoing dialogue with Karl Meyer, once a mentor and always an independent radical, has hit a rough patch. In a recent note he tells me that all is not well. “I wonder how it is possible,” he asks, “to have an intelligent dialogue with a philosopher who posits a…

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,…