The story is told, without any apparent reference to time or place, of a discussion about the qualifications of two candidates. “What do you think of our two candidates for mayor?” one gentleman asked another. “Well,” said the latter, “I am glad that only one can be elected.” For many, no doubt, this is the … Read more
A cartoon in the New Yorker puts us in the office of a “Mob Psychologist.” The psychologist is dutifully sitting in his armchair, notebook in hand, rather innocent-looking in glasses. He turns slightly to the patient. There, horizontal on the proverbial couch, lies a middle-aged Mafioso in pin-striped suit, fedora, dark glasses, bearing a certain … Read more
As I approached the end of the fourth grade at Our Lady of Fatima grade school in Seattle, I looked forward to becoming an altar boy. I looked up to them. Those older boys got to wear the white albs, stand up near the priest, and be in front of the entire church. They looked … Read more
I do a good deal of walking. In the instructions to my new Dexter walk shoes (more anon), I am told “walking conditions almost all of your 650 muscles, and uses all of your 206 bones.” Now, I happen never to have known the number of my muscles, let alone bones. Nor do I do … Read more
My brother-in-law in Medford, Oregon, ever alert to the cause of my continuing education, sent me a “Calvin and Hobbes,” a cartoon series I confess not to read much in spite of its explicit metaphysical and theological overtones. The scene begins in a schoolroom. The schoolmarm is standing before the blackboard instructing the class on … Read more
Recently, at a conference on the West Coast, I had the good fortune to be driven from the airport by a perceptive young graduate student, a Catholic. In the course of conversation, he told me that he stopped going to the local Catholic parish the day they removed the Crucifix on the altar to replace … Read more
In an Easter meditation he published in The Tablet of London on April 8, 1939, Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote that in comparison to other political and civil societies in history, the Church has not changed much. The sequence of rebellion and radical change that appears to be inherent in other institutions does not seem so … Read more
By chance, just before leaving my brother’s in Santa Cruz in January, I happened to notice an article in the San Jose Mercury-News commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of J.R.R. Tolkien. The article noted that a number of elaborate editions of Tolkien’s works are being published this year. It also identified several societies … Read more
The first day of the Clarence Thomas Senate Hearings, Mr. Kennedy read from an interview with Mr. Thomas in which Thomas suggested that perhaps in a perfect society we would not need things like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Commerce, and other such worrisome bodies. Mr. Kennedy was appropriately appalled at this … Read more
On the stacks of books by my computer monitor, I noticed a paperback novel with a black cover. I did not pay too much attention to it, except that I wondered where it came from, as I did not remember buying it nor did I recall anyone giving it to me. Perhaps I picked it … Read more
The feast of St. Luke was one of those perfectly beautiful October days in Washington, a Friday. After a noon class in which I was discoursing on Hobbes, a Saudi student in class told me that he liked this material. Machiavelli and Hobbes were not allowed to be studied in his country, he explained. His … Read more
In Chesteron’s book on St. Thomas Aquinas, the chapter on “The Aristotelian Revolution” begins, “Albert, the Swabian, rightly called the Great, was the founder of modern science. He did more than any other man to prepare that process, which has turned the alchemist into the chemist, and the astrologer into the astronomer.” Albert himself, however, … Read more
On my desk is a postcard I received several years ago from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The imprint on the card is a most curious one. It shows Socrates sitting on a throne-like chair with a kind of dunce cap on. He is behind a writing table, with a stylus in each hand. Perhaps … Read more
Scott Walter had sent me a notice of the annual Vassar used book sale, held during May usually in the Departmental Auditorium, across from the Museum of American History and Technology on Constitution Avenue. During the sale itself, Dennis Bartlett also reminded me of it when he told me that he had purchased for a … Read more
Justice,” I tell my classes, “is the harshest of the virtues. It is blind and relentless and in its own way inhuman.” If the world were built on justice alone, or even perhaps justice at all, it would be a terrible place. Fortunately, as St. Thomas says, the world is not so built. The world … Read more
Humanae Vitae, the encyclical on natural family planning, was published by Paul VI on July 29, 1968. At the time, I was teaching in Rome. I came to think, as I listened to the almost frantic criticism of the Pope, that something was terribly wrong, not with the teaching, but with the intellectual opposition to … Read more
Charlie Brown and Lucy are looking over the brick wall. Lucy has her elbows on the wall, with a sort of forlorn, not-again look on her face as she listens to Charlie Brown affirm, “I want to be liked for myself.” Charlie then turns on her with a kind of determined earnestness, “I don’t want … Read more
Before I left my room, I put a copy of Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays in my black carrying sack with the red letters The Tennessean marked on it. I walked across the Potomac on Key Bridge — one of the world’s loveliest vistas — to the Metro stop. The train came along shortly. … Read more
In a letter of October 6, 1956, Flannery O’Connor wrote that “part of Purgatory must be the realization of how little it would have to take to make a vice into a virtue.” She went on to remark that “the Communion of Saints has something to do with the fact that the burdens we bear … Read more
Wars and rumors of war are familiar themes in Scripture and familiar themes in the daily press. Indeed, the very expression of “wars and rumors of war” is from Matthew 24:6. We stumbled into a small war about a year after the largest threat of the modern era seemed to collapse by not fighting, though … Read more