A World of Speculation

Positives of St. Ephrem

O Lord and Master of my life,Take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk,But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to your servant.Yea, Lord and King, grant me to see my own faults and not judge my brother,For you...

I never thought I’d say this

It’s been a really bad week, and now, to top it all off, I find myself siding with Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown in a plagiarism lawsuit filed by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the 1982 work of...

Fact-checker request

Writing about the cartoon brouhaha in today’s Opinion Journal, Muslim (I think Persian) Amir Taheri writes:There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version...

Dialects brown and pink

I’m listening to a murder mystery on CD by Walter Mosley, titled Fear Itself, set in the brown community of Los Angeles of the 1950s. The POV character is a very literate bookstore owner who grew up in New Iberia, La. His friend and fellow hero is a...

A mother’s grief

The young mother sat on the floor beside the small white casket bedecked in white, pink and red flowers, and beside her sat a man in a dark suit and overcoat with a white scarf draped around his neck.I had told her I planned to be here between 9 and 10 tonight, too...

Schedules and change

First the good news. Our Intrepid Editor is back from Australia and running the Onion Dome again. He’s planning to put it to a monthly schedule and invites all you Orthodox satirists (of which there seem to be many — which probably says something, but I...