Notebooks

Imagining the Annunciation

Published at The Orthosphere on 9th of October, 2026.

I hope that those readers who remain on this wobbly sphere despite Professor Smith’s “lowering the tone” with his “querulous opinions” will indulge my presenting a little Catholic orthodoxy.

Ignatian contemplation, as St Ignatius elaborates in The Spiritual Exercises, involves the imaginative immersion in scenes from the Gospels. Similarly, Catholics are admonished, when praying the Rosary, to contemplate the the mystery associated with each decade. Under these influences, I tried to enter imaginatively into the first mystery—the Annunciation—of the first set of five mysteries—the Joyful Mysteries. The immediate problem is how to imagine the angel Gabriel.

Proprioceptive Ghosts

Published at The Orthosphere on the 28th August, 2026.

A name would not come to me. The name of a poet, Australian, Catholic, a writer of the verses of many hymns. Memory surrendered the composer of the music after a brief struggle—Richard Connolly—but the poet’s name it would not cough up.

There are times when a contest with uncooperative memory is pointless. I’m on a hiding to nothing because I have…nothing. I’m scratching around for a word or a name, and all I know is that once when I sought it in the myriad myriad of memory, its particular light would illuminate; but now only darkness. No string to tug on, no breadcrumbs to hope to follow. The only recourse in such blankness is to abandon effort, and allow it it come to mind unexpectedly in an hour or a day or never.

A Portal For the Angels

Published at The Orthosphere on 8th of June, 2026

Replying to my previous post on Baird and Douthat, JMSmith doubted the capacity of many contemporaries to experience what I’ll call “holy dread.” Similarly, The Smirking Gnostic wrote concerning his seventies peers of “shock at the ice cold consciousness of an existence for no reason other than lust satisfaction” and that still today the “worship of their bellies goes on unabated.” Given that my post concerned Douthat’s book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” theirs was a skeptical view of the optimistic thrust of the book.

Nonetheless, and despite much contrary evidence from interpersonal experience, there remains in me a stubborn central apprehension of the common human vocation to salvation. So I expect the call of that vocation to express itself to every human soul in one way or another. However it manifests, it will evoke a recognition and a decision, even if that decision is to brush it aside. Unless the response to this prompting is to seek out salvation, the prompts, I believe, will be recurrent. Such is the power of Eastertide.

Ross Douthat’s ‘Believe’: reviewing the review

Published at The Orthosphere on 16th of May, 2026.

A friend sent me the text of Robert P. Baird’s hostile review, in the New York Review of Books, of Ross Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Lest anyone mistake the intent, the article is titled God of the Gaps. I responded as (slightly edited) follows. Quoted blocks are from the review, except where otherwise indicated.

I was surprised at the venom in Baird’s dismissive introduction of Douthat, a venom drawn down by Douthat’s conservatism. What place such criticism has in a review of this particular book escapes me. Maybe it is just an indication of the vindictiveness of the political divide in the USA. Orthodox (lower case) Christians are, by definition, conservative, and I imagine that such considerations will tend to dispose NYRB readers against the book.

What is it like to be…?

What is it like to be a human being?

Published at The Orthosphere on 10th of June, 2025. This version has slight corrections.

Writing a half-century ago, Thomas Nagel, in his essay What Is It Like To Be a Bat?, sent a wake-up call to purveyors of “[t]he recent wave of reductionist euphoria” who claimed to have explained phenomenal consciousness in materialist terms.

…we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless…no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it.

He then reveals the purpose of his curious title.

[F]undamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.

This poses a severe problem for materialist analysis of consciousness.

It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. Without some idea, therefore of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of a physicalist theory.

On the Peculiar Difficulty of the Ascension

First published at The Orthosphere on 23rd August 2022, and not republished here by an oversight.

I had a lot of trouble with the Ascension. Every time I recite the Rosary, to take the most frequent example, I start with a declaration of belief—The Apostles’ Creed.

In saying the Creed, I assert a series of beliefs that are jarring to modern sensibilities, but not, for the most part, to me. I believe in God, and in his only-begotten Son. I believe in his conception, by divine intervention, in the womb of the Virgin. I believe that, his body in the tomb, Christ descended into Hell. There is much here to ponder, but it is all comfortably within the assent of faith.

Secret Women’s Business

First published in Quadrant as Secret Western Women’s Business on 29/08/2024 (now behind a paywall.) The article does not include the Victorian education graphs, but does include many mother and child art works.

Back in March, Janet Albrechtsen wrote a subversive article in The Australian, as is her wont. It was given the title Secret Truths of a Stay-Home Mother, and was accompanied by some delightful snapshots of Ms Albrechtsen with her three children. Her dander had been elevated, she explained, because…

…prominent [company] director Diane Smith-Gander claimed women were making a “false” choice to stay home to care for kids…being forced to make this “false choice” by taking on lower-paid work in order to care for children. She bemoaned a society that perpetuated a “gender stereotype that Dad goes out to work and Mum stays home with the kids”.

She recalled a conversation from her late 20s with a group of her peers by a playground at a Sydney beach who privately shared how much they loved staying home to care for their young children, and joked, sort of, that such a confession could not be made publicly.

We knew better than to rave in public about loving being stay-at-home mums – for two reasons. Hanging about playgrounds, wiping little noses and hands and bums wasn’t what we were meant to be doing after graduating from university with fine degrees, suiting up and working hard for big flash law practices and other professional firms. The other reason was we didn’t want our husbands edging us out of a role we loved.

The Gates of Gaza

(Published at New Catallaxy on 5th February 2024)

¹ Samson went to Gaza, and there he saw a prostitute, and he went in to her. ² The Gazites were told, “Samson has come here.” And they surrounded the place and set an ambush for him all night at the gate of the city. … ³ But…at midnight he arose and took hold of the doors of the gate of the city and the two posts, and pulled them up, bar and all, and put them on his shoulders and carried them to the top of the hill that is in front of Hebron. Judges 16

The term “gates of Gaza” has a more contemporary application. The Nahal program was set up in 1948 by Ben-Gurion as a way of combining military service with the founding of settlements and the associated farming. All told, 108 kibbutzim and other agricultural settlements were established. Many of these militarised settlements were set up on Israel’s borders, and served as the first line of defence. Nahal Oz was the first Nahal settlement. I’ll let Wikipedia, for what it’s worth, take up the story.

Gaza Postmodern

First published on NewCatallaxy.blog on 31st January, 2024

One of the first declarations of intent was reported from an unnamed official.

The unnamed defense official told Israel’s Channel 13 that the Palestinian territory, home to more than 2 million residents, would be reduced to rubble. “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.”

There have been plenty of others. In November the Agriculture Minister and Security Cabinet member Avi Dichter announced that, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” That is, the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

In Her Lane

First published in Quadrant Online on 10th November, 2023 as The Language and Logic of Sedition

Whether she was aware of the threat from early on in the campaign, or only fully realised its extent in conducting the post-mortem, Janet Albrechtsen exposed the wound in her article entitled Radical Idea About ‘Occupied Australia’ Must Be Confronted, published a fortnight after the referendum in The Weekend Australian.

She noted that, as if to validate the concerns of those like her who had vigorously opposed the referendum proposal, an anonymous group claiming to represent the “collective insights and views of a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, community members and organisations who supported Yes” brazenly claimed in an open letter that

Australia is our country … We do not for one moment accept that this country is not ours. Always was. Always will be. It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around. Our sovereignty has never been ceded.