Marc Barnes

The Times of Israel recently reported that archaeologists had uncovered a “miniscule biblical stone weight” from excavations of the foundations of the Western Wall of the Second Jewish Temple. It is round, about the size of a marble, and marked with the Hebrew word beka. . . . . Continue Reading »

My generation tends to think of itself as the first generation to be moral, tolerant, decent, and good. We abhor racism, sexism, nationalism, and homophobia, crimes we set at the center of past societies—all of them. We have avoided the bloody vices of slavery, torture, pillaging, religious . . . . Continue Reading »

I have a problem with hell that goes beyond squeamishness. The problem is one of inserting the damned into God’s endgame, his final fix—creation brought to its triumphant completion. Doesn’t the presence of everlasting torment put a damper on the success story? I went to Aquinas for . . . . Continue Reading »

The Star Wars prequels irreverently secularized the Force, making it a controllable entity, measurable and understandable, infinitely use-able. In Rogue One, the Force becomes spiritual once again. Continue Reading »

The camera-phone has inaugurated an era of therapeutic photography. It is a photography less concerned with producing photographs and more concerned with the act of taking a picture, the “click.” In Snapchat, the actual photo disappears after being taken and sent. It is the mode of most of our . . . . Continue Reading »

Books are solid. This is at once a physical description and a metaphysical one, and it is on this metaphysical solidity that we ought to ground our loyalty to the book over and against the allure of the ever-changing screen. A book is solid in the warm way a friend is solid: direct, dependable, . . . . Continue Reading »