This has not been a good week for the University of Chicago. One of its prize manuscripts — the Archaic Mark, a magnificent copy of Mark’s Gospel thought to have been from the 14th century — was just proven a forgery.  The ongoing debate as to the codex’s authenticity re-ignited in 2006 with its … Read more
Radley Balko links to an incredible Flickr set of images where modern-day scenes are overlapped with older photographs to give a seamless impression of different moments in time. Some have a great ghostly quality: Â Â While others give a startling look at just how quickly landscapes change, as in this shot of Dubai: Â … Read more
This has not been a good week for the University of Chicago. One of its prize manuscripts — the Archaic Mark, a magnificent copy of Mark’s Gospel thought to have been from the 14th century — was just proven a forgery.  The ongoing debate as to the codex’s authenticity re-ignited in 2006 with its … Read more
President Barack Obama gave his first State of the Union address last night. With his popularity in a steady decline over the past six months, Obama needed his speech to rekindle the enthusiasm for his leadership that elected him in the first place. Thus far, there is no evidence to suggest he was successful. If … Read more
…the largest and most important and best parts of my youth I spent in Traunstein, which very much reflects the influence of Salzburg. You might say that there Mozart thoroughly penetrated our souls, and his music still touches me very deeply, because it is so luminous and yet at the same time so deep. His … Read more
In the 1930s, a young Catholic professor at Oxford University began writing stories to read his children at Christmastime. They were tales full of well-known magical creatures — elves, dwarfs, knights, wizards, witches — but what made them unique was a race of his own imagining: the noble, plump little halflings he called “hobbits.” The … Read more
Most of the Christians I know chose to ignore Pat Robertson’s recent comments about Haiti’s ‘pact with the devil’ causing the earthquake. But who would have thought Robertson’s biggest defender would be British atheist Richard Dawkins? In fact, Roberston’s comments gave Dawkins yet another reason to share his contempt for Christians… this time, in the … Read more
In a piece that could easily have lampooned several putatively educational cable stations, the fine humorists at The Onion are reporting this morning that the “Science Channel Refuses to Dumb Down Science Any Further.” Â “Look, we’ve tried, we really have, but it’s simply not possible to set the bar any lower,” said a visibly … Read more
Hoo boy. This story is just tailor-made for breathless secular reporting: Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the “postulator” for Pope John Paul II’s cause for sainthood, has published a book titled Why He’s a Saint that claims, among other things, that the former pope practiced self-flagellation: In the book, Oder wrote that John Paul frequently denied himself … Read more
“Why does this man receive sinners and eat with them?” grumbled the scribes and the Pharisees. Knowing the pride they harbored in their hearts, Jesus spoke to them this parable. “What man is there among you,” He said, “who, having lost one sheep, will not leave the other ninety nine in the wilderness to find … Read more
This story on Newsday’s efforts to attract subscribers to its newly-pay-walled website a truly shocking fact: That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn’t know the number off the top of … Read more
Should corporations be considered persons? Is personhood the same as citizenship? And is money a legitimate form of free speech? These are the questions I’ve been asking myself since reading the news of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that corporations and unions are persons with free speech rights, therefore permitted to contribute as much money … Read more
It’s just not the Super Bowl without controversial advertising! But this year’s most talked-about ad is coming from an unlikely source: A national coalition of women’s groups called on CBS on Monday to scrap its plan to broadcast an ad during the Super Bowl featuring college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, which critics say is … Read more
Over at his popular Chicago Sun-Times blog, Roger Ebert calls attention to two documentaries that recently debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. Both films look at education, though from quite different angles. The first, Waiting for Superman, exposes the disaster of U.S. public education, and was so persuasive that it left the reliably liberal Ebert … Read more
Well, the Massachusetts Miracle (or Massacre, depending on who’s talking) is history, and the Abortion-Care Behemoth (and quite possibly Obama’s presidency) is finished, by all reports. So now, as pro-life victory celebrations over the election of Rudy Giuliani with a Pretty Face wind down, I’d like to vent a bit. Look at this … Read more
As most InsideCatholic readers may know by now, Thomas Peters of American Papist fame has joined forces with our friends at CatholicVote.org (Brian Burch and Joshua Mercer). You can bookmark the new American Papist location here. I asked young Thomas why he made the move. He put down his brew slowly and replied, A) I’ve … Read more
Browsing through my feedreader earlier today, I happened across this fascinating web page from Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), “a national, non-profit, Georgetown University affiliated research center that conducts social scientific studies about the Catholic Church.” Entitled “Frequently Requested Catholic Church Statistics,” it’s a compilation of particularly interesting statistics concerning the Catholic … Read more
Of all the things I remember about the Texas March for Life in Austin last January, the memory that stands out the most is the look on the faces of the counter-protesters who followed us along Congress Avenue and down to the capitol that frosty morning. When I glanced over to see the source … Read more
James H. at the Opinionated Catholic blog earlier this month had a friendly word of advice to Catholics who vocally oppose waterboarding and comparable forms of “enhanced interrogation”: stop acting like jerks. Without arguing pro- or con- (he seems to be wrestling with the question), James gives the Catholic anti-waterboarding crowd a “huge ol’ fat … Read more
In his “World Day of Communications” address released over the weekend, Pope Benedict encouraged priests to take advantage of the new media on behalf of the new evangelization: The pope, whose own presence on the Web has heavily grown in recent years, urged priests on Saturday to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to … Read more