According to IBM, these technologies will be available in 2015: Batteries could recharge with air contact, leapfrogging lithium-ion for heavy metals. Other batteries, such as those in laptops, could be recharged via kinetic energy. Holographic video chat would be available on cell phones. Personalized “adaptive traffic systems” would lay out routes that avoid traffic in … Read more
It’s a race to the finish of 2010 to bring you the fruits of this year before it ends. Brevity, be by my side and slay the demon logorrhea. Here, in brief, are treasures. The Classical era is my favorite for its balance and grace, but what can be new from this period? Haven’t we … Read more
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa is the official preacher to the Papal household and his Christmas meditations this year focused on how we need to return to the methods and means of the apostles to evangelize. According to the The Catholic News Agency: The three meditations gave a response of faith, with the help of Blessed John … Read more
At a restaurant in Jerusalem last August, I listened incredulously as two prominent Israeli journalists explained to me that President Obama did not care about a second term. Obama, they told me, was going to forge ahead toward an Israeli-Palestinian agreement with total disregard for any political fallout. It was Obama’s nature, they each asserted, to put … Read more
A student gave me G. K. Chesterton’s Poems, a handsome book (New York, John Lane). In it are love, war, religious and miscellaneous poems, ballads, and “Rhymes for the Times.” Its most famous poem is probably “Lepanto.” The most intriguing is “Antichrist, or The Reunion of Christendom, an Ode.” The religious poems are often about … Read more
A little chapel in Wisconsin called Our Lady of Good Help has officially become the first site in the United States of a validated Marian apparition, according to the New York Times. In 1859, a Belgian immigrant named Adele Brise claims to have been visited by Mary three times. The Blessed Mother instructed Brise to devote her … Read more
One of the first Christmas gifts I received this year was a speeding ticket. For years, I have made a hobby of collecting verbal warnings for driving too fast. I know I drive too fast. I am working on it. And I am getting pretty good at smiling, apologizing, and offering sympathetic and yet entirely … Read more
Happy Christmas Eve! Things might be a little quiet around here today, as the InsideCatholic staff goes about its last-minute preparations for tomorrow (please tell me I’m not the only one who still has presents left to buy?…). In the meantime, below are a few quick holiday links to tide you over. And from all … Read more
Has there ever been a season that has stood by Hollywood longer or more faithfully than Christmas? From Clarence’s Twain-wielding celestial bumbler to Wallace and Davis dancing their former commander back to relevance; from leggy lamps and BB guns to John McClane’s profane holiday jingles — the list of memorable Yuletide moments is almost endless. Nearly … Read more
Christmas is to Hollywood what a bank is to a crook. The kids are home for the holidays, the house is full of restless guests who need tending — so why not take the afternoon off and go to the movies? And go we do, in numbers that fill the larcenous hearts of studio moguls … Read more
It’s December 23rd, a little late for me to be throwing out gift ideas for Christmas. Then again, the celebration only just begins on the 25th, and then there’s the 12 days of Christmas and the feast of Epiphany. Plus, there’s something to be said for getting an early start on next year, right? When … Read more
First it was the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, on Oprah; now, the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville are taking over NPR. Or, at least, “All Things Considered”: A segment on last night’s program profiled the Dominican sisters who, like their counterparts in Ann Arbor, are theologically orthodox, live in … Read more
I put this on our Twitter feed yesterday, but it’s too disgusting to let pass without a post. Lanny Davis, high powered Democratic lobbyist and former special counsel to President Bill Clinton, has a new client: Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo. That would be the same Laurent Gbagbo who refuses to recognize his re-election loss … Read more
2010 was a horrible year for health care — that is, if you believe abortion is not “health care.” The ObamaCare health legislation, if not amended by the next Congress, will result in hundreds of thousands of federally funded abortions that would not happen without that funding. But Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, who is a … Read more
That’s Chesterton’s idea, not mine. But he was surely right. Chesterton knew that, so long as the atheist remembers a Christmas of long ago, when it seemed that the stars themselves were made only that they might twinkle upon a stable in Bethlehem, he may yet someday become a man worthy of the boy he … Read more
To me, there’s nothing that quite says “Christmas” like schadenfreude — that grim satisfaction one takes in watching the suffering of others, especially other people whose ideas are evil. The Church father Tertullian used to write in lengthy detail of how the Romans who tortured Christians would undergo the same tortures themselves in hell, while … Read more
The Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues (PNCI), a pro-life outreach to members of democratically-elected legislatures, reports that Lord Nicholas Windsor has described abortion as “the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life.” The great-grandson of King George V penned the essay “Caesar’s Thumb: Europeans should not forget their most pressing moral issue: abortion” in … Read more
I’m a Ricky Gervais fan… a big Ricky Gervais fan. The original BBC version of The Office was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, and there were moments in his follow up series, Extras, that were equally hilarious. I’ve also enjoyed his stand-up comedy — rare for me — as well as his frenetic and … Read more
As we enter the last few days before we rightly give our hearts over to the joy of Christmas, we might take a few minutes in prayer over two brief passages from the past about the meaning of Advent. Here’s the first. The great Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that We have … Read more
The New York Times reported yesterday on Pope Benedict’s Christmas message to Vatican hierarchy in Rome where he spoke about the clergy sexual abuse crisis: Pope Benedict XVI said on Monday that the continuing sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church had reached a “degree we could not have imagined” this year, and that … Read more