When people saw the videos of a horde of North African migrants storming the Spanish-held peninsula of Ceuta, many immediately recalled a famous scene from the film World War Z where a horde of zombies mount a border wall and flood one of the last remaining uninfected cities. Here was a real-life violent invasion of heedless military-aged men stampeding through a small, vulnerable Spanish town…

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For a year and a half, I couldn’t listen to the radio. Every song was haunted by a memory. I’d hear the first few notes of a song like “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar and I’d be catapulted into my preteen years, belting out the lyrics into a shared hairbrush microphone during a sleepover with my best friend. Ever since she’d sent the text rendering her my “ex” best friend…

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The United States Senate will soon vote whether to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt for refusing to answer a Senate committee’s questions. On July 29, the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing in which Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination when asked…

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From the plains of Oklahoma, and practically on the frontage road of Interstate 35, rises a visual anomaly: a magnificent, white, Spanish Colonial mission-style church. You might more reasonably expect a working oil field or an Indian casino along I-35; but instead, the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother crowns the unremarkable landscape like the Emerald City of Oz. The Shrine is the pride of…

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After the 1534 Act of Supremacy unequivocally declared the monarch to be the “supreme head” of the Church in England, certain friends of St. Thomas More advised him to accept the Act, leaving questions of ecclesial authority to clergy and theologians. King Henry VIII, it could be reasoned, was taking a position on the authority of the bishop of Rome within the Catholic Church…

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“Nothing is more scandalous than a man who is proud of his humility.” Marcus Aurelius did not have Pope Francis in mind when he wrote this, but he could have. Francis was proud of his humility. He carried his own luggage and chose an austere domicile over the Apostolic Palace. While these gestures were seen as innocuous, one ostentatious display of humility was pernicious.

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On a tombstone in a quiet cemetery in West Sussex, England, a brief inscription marks the place where one of the great figures of the English theater awaits the resurrection. His name is Paul Scofield, who died in 2008. “On stage,” the inscription reads, “his voice split the silence / his whisper cast a spell / Now his stage is dark, / Silence reclaims him, / and we his wife and family…

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AGI is coming, and coming soon. At least that’s what most of the AI experts are saying. AGI—artificial general intelligence—is the ability of an AI system to perform any cognitive task that an educated human can do. As opposed to AIs that can perform one or two tasks well, an AGI would be able to do any intellectual activity as competently as the smartest human in each field. And not only do…

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The new British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is a Catholic—which may cause some problems, given that the Constitution of the officially Anglican nation he now leads implies that this may be technically illegal, at least for the performance of certain obscure duties of the office. But not to worry, Burnham can always get around this simply by virtue of compliant constitutional scholars pointing…

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St. John Paul II often lamented that “America needs more saints!” He was right of course—and he did his best to amp up the number of Saints from the Western Hemisphere—though we are still eagerly awaiting the first native-born diocesan priest Saint from the United States. While it is often noted that St. John Paul II canonized more Saints than all of his predecessors combined in the preceding…

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