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Creating a definitive list of the most beautiful cities in the world is a downright impossible task. Depending on who you ask, you’d yield wildly different results. As expected, Frank Lloyd Wright judged a city’s beauty on architecture (he was a fan of Chicago), while Ezra Pound was taken by the poetry of a place’s sky at night (“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there…” he wrote). Walt Whitman said it’s the people that make a city great, and Aristotle pointed out that “a great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” All this to say, our list is by no means definitive. Twenty cities is far too few to sum up all the world’s beauty. But we have taken a stab at highlighting some supremely spectacular places...

Reading Mark’s Gospel with the Faith of Saint Peter and the Church Saint Peter’s Second Epistle soars the heights of the Spirit akin to the spiritual heights of John’s proclamation of the Gospel (Jn 1:1–14). He whose gift of faith caused Christ to change his name to the “Rock” is no less gifted in spiritual insight and writing than Saint Paul and John the Evangelist. Too often, exegetes have developed a filter through which they hear a Galilean fisherman instead of “Kephas” (Jn 1:42); the one anointed with heavenly wisdom and the prophetic spirit. The wisdom that comes from above is always higher than the knowledge that comes from earthly matters. Because Mark’s Gospel is the recorded tradition of Saint Peter, and Mark doesn’t seem to emphasize Jesus’s pre-existence as do the other Gospel ...

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I love manual transmissions. I grew up driving with a stick. I still own one as my technical “daily driver,” even though it’s seldom driven daily while I’m testing cars. But each year, the list of vehicles offering manual transmissions grows smaller. And my sentiments feel like even more of an anachronism. The debate is not so much whether the manual transmission is dying but where it resides on the death continuum, with only a few niche models keeping it on life support. The forces at work against the manual transmission are insurmountable, and even the #savethemanuals hashtag has profound “old man shouting into the wind” energy. 1. Automatic transmissions are simply better than manual transmissions Automatic transmissions have become far better than they once were. Current auto boxes are...

[embedded content] Tradition holds it snowed on the site of the Basilica of St. Mary Major in the middle of summer in the 4th century. Services Marketplace – Listings, Bookings & Reviews Entertainment blogs & Forums

As dairy alternatives such as almond, oat, and soy milk continue to grow in popularity, an centuries old question regarding cow’s milk still remains. How does today’s dairy differ from what previous generations consumed?  Some clues are now emerging in the form of some 117-year-old whole milk powder that was transported on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition in the early 20th Century. A study published in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of Dairy Science found that despite advancement in selective cow breeding and changes to farm practices, milk from the present and past have more similarities than differences.  The Nimrod expedition The powdered milk in the study was made by New Zealand’s Defiance brand in 1907. On New Year’s Day in 1908, Shackleton and his c...

Back in the game, no teams, and ‘sports entertainment’ Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Happy Wednesday friends,  I’m back from vacation, and JD and I have traded places this week. He’s somewhere in the wilds of the Carolinas doing I’m not sure what, but he did mention some risk of bears. So keep him and his family in your prayers. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled Tuesday and Friday newsletters next week. Though, I would hasten to add, shifting to these once-a-week Pillar Posts doesn’t mean the news has slowed down any — on the contrary. It’s just neither JD nor I can find the time to write two of them in a week, so these are basically double issues, as you’ll see. For myself, I had a welcome wee...

In the Sunday readings following the National Eucharistic Congress, the Church’s liturgy presents Jesus’s own deep dive into the Eucharist: Five consecutive weeks of Gospel readings from John, Chapter 6, starting last week and now continuing on the 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B. Jesus directly states the theme for Day 2 of his “Eucharistic Congress” and it’s this: “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” This is easier said than done because we are talking about a belief that contradicts what we see. Jesus gives some astonishing reasons to trust him anway, which we will get to. But the first words Jesus says spell out the dilemma. Crowds have been following him, ecstatic over the multiplication of the loaves. He tells them: “Amen, Amen, I say to you, you are lo...

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What needed to be said about the sacrilegious opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics has been said — with righteous indignation and appropriate anger. Catholics were right to take offense at what is offensive to God and to fiercely denounce it. There is no shortage of biblical precedents to draw upon. The sacrilege took place within five broader contexts: Satan at work in the world, cultural confusion, corporate influence, ecclesial criticism and preventive preparation. Satan Returns to France Satan came back. To be sure, the demons are never wholly absent from this fallen world. But sometimes their work is more easily seen. On July 26, 2016, 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel was celebrating morning Mass in Normandy, France, when two young jihadists from ISIS killed him, slitting his thro...

Readings:Exodus 16:2–4, 12–15Psalm 78:3–4, 23–25, 54Ephesians 4:17, 20–24John 6:24–35 The journey of discipleship is a lifelong exodus from the slavery of sin and death to the holiness of truth on Mount Zion, the promised land of eternal life. The road can get rough. And when it does, we can be tempted to complain like the Israelites in this week’s First Reading. We have to see these times of hardship as a test of what is in our hearts, a call to trust God more and to purify the motives for our faith (Deuteronomy 8:2–3). As Paul reminds us in this week’s Epistle, we must leave behind our old self-deceptions and desires and live according to the likeness of God in which we are made. Jesus tells the crowd in this week’s Gospel that they are following Him for the wrong reasons. They seek Him ...

With so much interest in the work of art, it’s worth reconsidering what exactly it depicts — and how contemplating it can help all of us grow in Eucharistic devotion. Here are five spiritually significant features of da Vinci’s masterpiece. The Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics shocked Christians and others around the world by depicting a sexualized version of the Institution of the Eucharist. In particular, the disturbing drag-queen display appropriated one of the most iconic depictions of this climactic moment from salvation history: Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th-century masterpiece, The Last Supper. Ironically, although there are serious concerns that the ceremony was a clear instance of blasphemy, it may end up sparking renewed interest in the Renaissance artwork — and the sacrame...