Last updated 07.10.07

There are many ways to sing the Rosary. This is just one of them. No single approach is authorized or mandated by the Church. Still, the method set forth below carries a certain weight of tradition, for it draws, wherever possible, on the most venerable customs and practices of our Catholic ancestors.

Most of the prayers contained in the Rosary — the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, the Salve Regina and so on — have been sung for centuries in the form of Gregorian chants. I do not know if these chants were ever used for the specific purpose of singing the Rosary, but it seems likely.

Wherever I could find free audio files on the Internet featuring traditional chants corresponding to the Rosary prayers, I linked to them here. Read more… »

Figure 1. “I think, therefore I am“, stated French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) in his influential 1637 treatise Discourse on Method. Descartes’ celebrated formulation, “Je pense, donc je suis” — better known in its Latin translation, Cogito ergo sum — gave rise to modern atheism, according to Pope John Paul II. (1)

When I penned my whimsical little piece about the resemblance between extinct trilobites and certain species of isopods still living in the Antarctic seas, little did I suspect that I was blundering into a philosophical minefield contested by warring armies of Biblical fundamentalists and Cartesian literalists. (2)

At issue is “creationism” — the notion that God created all life forms at roughly the safe time, as the Book of Genesis seemingly implies. Since writing my piece, I have learned that claims of a “living trilobite” often figure in the ideational kerfuffle surrounding life’s origins.

Many creationists argue that the existence of living creatures resembling trilobites casts doubt on the theory of evolution. Their argument goes something like this: Inasmuch as generations of paleontologists have insisted that the trilobite is extinct, and inasmuch as certain types of Antarctic isopods living today bear so close a resemblance to fossil trilobites that only a DNA test could disprove their kinship for sure, Read more… »

Figure 1. This newly-discovered Antarctic arthropod strongly resembles the trilobite, believed to have been extinct for more than 250 million years.

Scientists are calling it a new species of serolid isopod. But any amateur fossil hunter will see in this newly-discovered creature a strong resemblance to the trilobite — a crab-like arthropod which presumably went extinct more than 250 million years ago, after flourishing for some 251 million years in the primordial seas.

During three Antarctic voyages between 2002 and 2005, the German research vessel Polarstern discovered more than 700 new species of marine life, in frigid depths ranging from 774 to 6,348 meters (about 2,500 to 21,000 feet). The creature shown on the left — identified as a new type of serolid isopod — was one of the exotic beasts found by the Polarstern expedition. (1)

A quarter of a billion years ago, trilobites were among the most abundant life forms on earth. Read more… »

Well, it was short and sweet. My tenure as editorial director of TheVanguard.org (TVO) came to an end last night, having lasted only three months, from February 1 to April 30, 2007.

Following a candid discussion with TVO Founder and Chairman Rod Martin last night, we agreed to end our association, due to our differing and strongly-held views concerning organizational priorities and strategy. Honorable men can agree to disagree, and so Rod Martin and I have done. Read more… »