The Narthex

On my evening walk, I spied a silver-bearded fellow sitting up like a marmot-in-surveillance between the wall and bushes of the Senior Center. I gave him a brief sidelong glance. His steady glare seemed threatening, but I could have imagined that, for it was hard to judge from a distance.…

The Pew Research Center has recently issued new data on the decline of Christianity in the U.S., a decline they say "continues at a rapid pace." Below is a link to the Pew survey results. A few highlights: - 65% of American adults now describe themselves as Christians, while those…

Are we made for fun or folly? I’d vote for fun over folly, and it would be folly to so sharply limit our options. Why not allow for both? Let me begin with fun. Penning a clerihew is fun. What’s a clerihew, you ask? Its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a…

Decades ago, to avoid social isolation, I took up ballroom dancing and within a month met an attractive woman who was my age. She could dance well and had a compatible personality, so we hit it off. We entered dance contests and won prizes. We dined out every week and…

I met Bill, a 92-year-old retired Hewlett Packard technician, while he was standing outside a packed pool room waiting his turn at a senior-center billiards tournament. He was wearing a Starved Rock, Illinois T-shirt. Such an unusual name got the better of me, so I asked. “It’s a national park,…

We’ve some sorting and distinguishing to do when it comes to the debate about nations and nationalism. If we shy away from the job, we’ll find ourselves dealing with nonsense and, to borrow from Bentham, nonsense on stilts. A first distinction is between nation and state. For over a hundred…

A Convention of the Right met in Paris a few weekends ago. In France as in much of the EU, conservative and traditional beliefs are called extreme by the media. So, you can bet journalists assigned to the convention had their ears out for trouble -- and did they get…

Late on a Sunday morning I walked into the nursing home to visit Della. I peeked into her double-occupancy room. Her bed was closest to the hall door, and she lay there with her eyes closed. But she somehow knew when to open them and look at me. Though her…

Global arms sales are booming, despite a multilateral Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) officially adopted in 2013. As of last month, 105 countries have ratified the ATT, including half the world’s top ten arms producers. The U.S. signed the treaty in 2013 but never ratified it. Critics of the treaty see…

I’ve just reconnoitered a website that lays out seventeen well-argued essays on whether capital punishment is inherently wrong. Their authors don’t reach a consensus, nor is one likely to emerge any time soon. So what are we to do? As always with controverted questions, we should pray for clarity and…

As the spiritual influence of the Church has waned in the West, it has created a spiritual void in the lives of many people.  Devoid of religion, the people still desire to be “spiritual but not religious.”  Nature abhors a vacuum, so this void is being filled by a great…

It was a Thursday afternoon. I was working from home and had just finished a coffee break with my wife when one of the neighbors called through my front screen door, “Come quickly. There’s been an emergency.” I rushed to her house, where another of our neighbors from the block,…

Pope Benedict XVI once famously remarked that the Church of the future "will become small."  Rather than exercising some prophetic gift, the Pope was simply exercising an awareness of history.  Each time the Church becomes comfortable, it falls into decline and dwindles to a remnant through which it will be…

Three houses over from mine, Wanda, a 72-year-old woman, lived with Marsha, her 47-year-old daughter, and Devan, her 17-year-old granddaughter. The teen got pregnant, and not long after baby Gary was born, the kid’s father was knifed to death in a gang fight. His lifeblood pooled in front of my…

Hugo Rahner, SJ, is the author of a classic work Man at Play. The central and staggering insight of Man at Play is that God is at play! How so? Proverbs 8:27-31 gives us a starting point. From the beginning, Rahner points out, Divine Wisdom (Hochmah) has been “playing before…