The Narthex

Most crimes are petty. Shop lifting, for instance, spikes over the holiday season. Maybe crimes of passion do so as well. They’re the result of “affairs,” formerly spoken of as adultery and fornication. Some crimes are heinous, and they make the front page. Last week a serial killer confessed to…

In his prescient dystopic novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley foretells a time when children are mass produced in a laboratory using what he calls the Bokanovsky Process.  This process ensures the stability of Huxley’s World State because it genetically conditions the children into each of five social castes.  While…

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…

In a 2014 address to representatives of the International Association of Penal Law, Pope Francis announced his crusade for abolishing capital punishment world-wide. His march would continue until August of this year when he ordered a revision to Catechism paragraph 2267 deeming the death penalty “inadmissible.” While a change to…

Remember the drill? Which of these things does not belong? Example #1 (apple, banana, carrot). Easy! A carrot isn’t a fruit, so it doesn’t belong. Example # 2 (cat, dog, butterfly). Well, a butterfly isn’t a mammal, so it doesn’t belong. The logical point in each example is that the…

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…

Pope Francis is humanely concerned with over a dozen man-made problems that even school kids would wonder why the world doesn’t do something about: plastics littering the oceans, deadly drug gangs in Mexico, insane wars sparked by the pride of men, murderous Christian persecutions in Muslim nations, materialistic culture and…

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…

In a low-rent Beacon Hill tenement where I once lived, I visited almost daily a disabled pensioner who was a former horse jockey, recently suffering from blackouts. He had had a metal plate embedded in his skull after a racing tumble, and it caused him unpredictable fainting spells. His merely…

You may recall New Oxford Review’s story of a Providence College student named Michael Smalanskas, who bravely confronted politically-correct college administrators over his display about traditional Church teaching on marriage (see “The New Hate Speech: Catholic Teaching at a Catholic College,” May 2018; link here: https://www.newoxfordreview.org/documents/the-new-hate-speech-catholic-teaching-at-a-catholic-college/). Now it’s another…

When I die, I’ll have plenty to say. But, gentle reader, you’ll not hear it. Friends, neighbors, and writers of obituaries will, no doubt, have something to say. Fortunately, with my not being an old soldier, no one will comment that “he just faded away.” Most of us, it seems,…

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…