Orthosphere – 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.

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.

The Long Weekend

Published at The Orthosphere on Easter Saturday, 2021.

It’s Saturday. As Friday waned, the old world died. All of the old certainties were bound up with aloes and myrrh in linen, and laid to restlessness.

Now we wait. There are rumours of Sunday. I have heard, and I believe – as so many have, as so many have not. Some who have believed have made new worlds and all who have believed have made new lives; lives inconceivable on Friday. Some who have disbelieved have built fortresses of unbelief; all who have disbelieved have turned their faces from the east. But all who hear these rumours have been put the question extraordinary, and all have been obliged to answer.

This Saturday, empires have risen and collapsed. Hosts of hosts have lived and died. None of the understandings of Friday can be re-imagined, save the one stubborn link, and that one passing over Calvary.

When will night fall on this expectant Saturday?

The Virgin Birth

Published at The Orthosphere on the Solemnity of the Annunciation.

Nothing is impossible to God. Occam’s Razor cannot separate the works of God according to any principle of economy. What economy is evident in a cell, a tree, the biosphere, the galaxy, the farthest reaches of the universe? Irrespective of the models we construct to map and try to predict the behaviour of these things, all of them, in their concrete reality, are unfathomably complex, and each is a unique instance. What principle can place limits on the actions of the creator of all these wonders?

With this in mind, consider the conception, gestation and birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Accepting as an irreducible given that Mary, his blessed mother, “knew not man,” there is a minimalist scenario – Occam’s scenario, so to speak. On this view, the action of the Holy Ghost consisted in fusing a DNA strand of his own making with the DNA in a mature ovum of the Blessed Virgin, which at the moment of the Annunciation and Mary’s fiat, was making its way down one of her fallopian tubes. And with, “I am the servant of the Lord,” that fusion took place, and the Son became flesh as a single fertilised ovum.

The Father of Lies

[Published at The Orthosphere, 20/12/2010]

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44

On November 9th, Tucker Carlson offered the following prescription for curing the ills of the USA.

Let’s all stop lying. Lying about everything that matters, every day of our lives. That’s what we’re doing now. Have you noticed? How many times did you lie today because you had to? Let’s repeal our national dishonesty mandate (it’s a law never codified but still ruthlessly enforced) and tell the truth instead. That’s our only hope. Tell the truth about everything. Continue reading “The Father of Lies”

The Pope’s Commission

[First published at The Orthosphere.]

Faithful Catholics are expected to accept that, although the Pope is elected by the Conclave of (eligible) Cardinals, the One who really selects the Pope is the Holy Ghost Himself: the cardinals are His catspaws, so to speak. It is a grave offence to leak the proceedings of the Conclave (which is why such leaking is so rare), but if the preceding is to be accepted, the machinations in the Conclave are irrelevant. Therefore, I can appreciate both the smile and the squirm of orthodox Catholics who, in these very pages, see the so-ordained Pope described as … ahem … Pope Fruit Loops I.

Continue reading “The Pope’s Commission”

Consciousness & Time: Part 2

A Little Consciousness

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

T. S. Eliot from Burnt Norton Stanza II

In 1937, The Philosophical Review published an article by Hermann Hausheer (HH) titled St. Augustine’s Conception of Time. It’s a lovely discussion of Augustine’s wrestling with the mystery of time, by a writer with great affection for the saint. He invites us to ponder, yet again, Time’s inescapable coils. Hausheer’s sources are primarily from the book in which autobiography, as we still understand it, seems to have been invented – Confessions– with some additional material from The City of God.

Continue reading “Consciousness & Time: Part 2”