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Eye color is complicated. But until a few years ago, few scientists described it that way. As recently as the aughts, it was believed that eye color was determined by a single gene — brown, dominant; blue, recessive. It’s a rule many may remember from high school biology class when studying Gregor Mendel, considered the father of modern genetics. But recent research has helped makes things much clearer. In fact, eye color is determined by multiple genes. And, further, eye color is as specific to an individual as a thumbprint. In one of the most recent studies, published in Science Advances in March 2021, a team of researchers out of King’s College in London who looked at the eye color of 195,000 people and determined there are dozens of genes for eye color. “[Our eye color is] one of the m...

COMMENTARY: The measured response from the pope emeritus to the attacks on his character makes for effective spiritual reading. For more than 70 years as a priest, Joseph Ratzinger set for himself the mission of seeking and proclaiming the truth; he chose “cooperators of the truth” as his episcopal motto. He did just that in his response to the Munich inquiry in sexual abuse, defending the facts of the matter against prevailing opinion, and elevating the entire matter by placing it in the liturgical context of sin, contrition, judgment and salvation. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI contested the report of the German law firm that conducted the inquiry, with his legal team arguing that the facts did not support the findings. They argued that the inquiry itself acknowledged a “lack of evidence,” ...

A disgraced nun who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Los Angeles Catholic elementary school and went on Vegas gambling sprees will be reciting her penance from inside a federal prison cell. Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, of Los Angeles, was sentenced Monday to one year and one day for fraud and money laundering charges. The 80-year-old nun also was ordered to pay a total of $825,338.57 in restitution for the money she embezzled while she was a principal at St. James Catholic School in Torrance, Calif. Prosecutors said Kreuper, who was the school’s principal for 28 years, diverted funds to pay for expenses that her order — the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet — would never have approved, including large gambling expenses from casino trips and credit card charges she made from...

(Image: Clay Banks/Unsplash.com) While away recently for a speaking engagement, I sat down to dinner in a parish hall in the time between Mass and my talk. I chatted affably with a couple at our table until the husband got up to get wine. The wife’s countenance shifted and she seethed, “Why weren’t you wearing a mask in Mass?” Taken off guard, I let out a nervous laugh which she imitated back to me with venom. I asked why she felt threatened by me when I was at least ten feet away from her in Mass, but now at dinner felt safe although unmasked and just two feet away. She answered that she’s vaccinated and has trust in the experts’ policy decisions regarding sitting to dinner. Neither the appeal to the vaccine nor to the experts made up for the absurdity of the situation. There is nothing a...

“We’re never going to storm the barricades,” Adler-Bell admitted. But if you’re willing to temporarily overlook their politics, this small cadre of leftist podcasters doesn’t look totally unlike the band of dissident right-wing intellectuals that gathered around National Review in the middle of the 20th century. Their focus might not be on electoral strategy per se, but it would be a mistake to write their project off as completely detached from the messy business of politics. Instead, it’s possible to see it as a half strategic, half therapeutic effort to put the left’s intellectual house in order before it ventures back into the political thicket. Know Your Enemy is a product of its times, but it is also self-consciously removed from them. On the rare occasion Sitman and Adler-Bell take ...