Mosaic Ark

Who’s up for a game of Polandball? Or to be less whimsical, who’s up for defining what makes a nation? Last week, the ladies of the Mosaic Ark discussed that question and its expression in the Reddit phenomenon called Polandball, which are ongoing community-created comics where little balls stand in for the nations and express ideas unique to their culture. This week, we narrowed the nation questi...

What is a nation? That’s a simple enough question, isn’t it? After much discussion, points and counterpoints made, history explored, and the opinions of various historical and contemporary figures considered, the ladies of the Mosaic Ark have decided….It's complicated! Is it a geographical area, a shared ethnicity, religion, language or culture? Is it blood? Or is it merely a legal designation? Jo...

This week was a flurry of activity for the newly re-elected President Trump. There were concerts, and parades, and luncheons, speeches, and formal dinners and dances, and of course the swearing-in ceremony. It was all very magical from the red coat-wearing and bewigged United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps to the black-robed Supreme Court Justice eliciting a sworn oath from the then Pre...

This week the ladies of the Mosaic Ark were joined by Robert Kroese, science fiction author extraordinaire! He has 35 published titles to his name and is the founder of Based Con, an annual gathering for authors and fans of science fiction and fantasy. We discussed everything from his humble beginnings as a precocious, aspiring writer in the second grade, through his stint as a software engineer,...

2024 has ended and the New Year is but minutes away for some in these United States of America. It’s time for reflection on the past and speculation of the future. Join the ladies of the Mosaic Ark as we discuss the runup to 2025, and especially the most recent X-wars over all things pirate from the East India Trading Company to the modern would-be robber barons of today—Elon Musk and Vivek Ramasw...

“O Dayspring, Brightness of the everlasting light, Sun of justice, come to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death!” Thus sings the Church on December 21, the darkest day of the year. On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies discussed the Catholic tradition of preparing for Advent by singing the “O Antiphons,” which are short sung sentences describing a specific aspect of p...

Myths, threads, and spider webs — that’s what the ladies of the Mosaic Ark discussed this week. Specifically, we discussed how all information from ancient times through the present, all history, literature, art, science, music, and religion have been compressed into a digital scroll that is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This ability to “scroll” information has also allowed...

Have you noticed the trend lately? “Strong independent woman” is a trope that keeps popping up in movies, television shows, and advertisements, and especially in political advertisements. “Single cat ladies” were the largest group that voted for Kamala Harris in the last election, and groups of witches were casting spells against her opponent. Their number one issue seemed to be the right to an ab...

Recently on an episode of The Timcast with Tim Pool , Tim was debating with his guests about whether America was created as a Christian nation. John Adams’ 1798 letter to a Massachusetts regiment was offered as evidence that it was, as Adams wrote “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But what does “religious” mea...

What is digital mysticism? When you hear that phrase, do you imagine hermetic robots meditating in a virtual reality landscape chanting ohms? That may be getting a little bit ahead tech-wise. If you imagined that the information technology revolution that we’ve all been living through since Marshall McLuhan coined his famous phrase “The medium is the message,” you’re a little closer to understandi...

Remember, remember the fifth of November…. Where were you on November 5, 2024 – the day that Donald John Trump was elected to a second term as President of the United States? If you were like the Ladies of the Mosaic Ark, you were up for most of the night watching the national election results, afraid to go to sleep for fear of getting a nasty shock in the morning. Turns out, most of the country f...

Who is Fencing Bear? Why, she writes the Blog called Fencing Bear at Prayer ! Who is Ancilla Mariae? Why, she hosts the Telegram Channel called Fencing Bear at Prayer and its chatroom called The Dragon Common Room! Who is Professor Rachel Fulton Brown? Why, she is a Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Chicago! As well as the creator of the aforementioned Blog and Telegram channels....

The ladies of the Mosaic Ark are looking at the stars! Captain Zodiac, the Mosaic Ark’s very first guest, once again joined us to share his insights about astrology and its true meaning—which does not include divination he’ll have you know! He and Professor Rachel Fulton Brown discussed the beautiful medieval Christian manuscripts that are currently on display at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. T...

“I have ever been prone to seek adventure and to investigate and experiment where wiser men would have left well enough alone.” ― Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars What does it mean to say that the world was once enchanted, but now it is not? To answer that question, one must ask, “what is a myth, and how can it be both true and false?” On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies were joined by S...

“Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind, and through the air, cloudy and serene, and every kind of weather through which you give sustenance to Your creatures.” — St. Francis of Assisi, “Canticle of the Creatures” (1225) As the fallen-away followers of our Lord Jesus Christ might have said, this is a hard teaching, especially this week. How do we praise God for “every kind of weather” after...

Mimetic Desire. This was the phrase used by René Girard to describe the human condition of wanting to obtain that which others have already obtained; not to be confused with envy, mimetic desire is simply an extension of the way we learn what we should and shouldn’t want — food, shelter, love, etc. Can this be observed in everyday life, in fiction, in geopolitics? Yes, yes, and yes, through a phen...

Isis and Osiris. Apollo and Artemis. Donald and Kamala? Twins are memorable features in the world’s mythological systems; they are symbols of duality, balance, and integrating opposites. One might say our myths have conditioned us to look for similarities when presented with two choices. On last week’s Mosaic Ark, we discussed the visual image presented by presidential candidate Kamala Harris and...

“It’s our time.” Vice President Kamala Harris is quoted as having said this recently to her fellow women as she seeks to win one of the most powerful positions of authority in the world, President of the United States. However, the time of powerful women’s leadership has already come and gone… and come and gone… and come and gone again, has it not? The ladies of the Mosaic Ark remember a time not...

What is the Mosaic Ark? What kind of a livestream is it? The best way to describe it is this: it is a cruise ship! The Mosaic Ark takes its viewers on a cruise through an ocean of information, images, art, science, history, and (very occasionally) political events. Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Medievalist and Tolkien expert, is your cruise director bringing you to interesting ports of call every...

Watching the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, many people were outraged by the display of drag queen camp and hedonism included in the show, particularly because it was done in a way that many claimed mocked Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” Christians world-wide demanded apologies in the strongest of terms. The ladies of the Mosaic Ark were also outraged—but not for the same reason! Presu...

“’Twas our Right!” to write poetry, and thereby speak our creative world into being. In this week’s Mosaic Ark, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown speaks about J.R.R. Tolkien’s creative process, how it began and how he was able to create an entire world using both poetry and prose. But, most importantly, how without his poetry there would’ve been no story; poetry was the engine that drove the vehicle o...

Who elects a King? Is it God or the Barons? Who elects a President? Is it the billionaire class, the tech oligarchs, the “donor class”? Is there a difference between any of them and the Barons; between a King and a President? If one looks at the rhetoric of the past and present, there doesn’t seem to be a difference. But there is another similarity between the power struggles of the past and prese...

On July 13th, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump was shot while speaking at a rally for his re-election campaign in Butler County, Pennsylvania. To protect him from getting shot again, the Secret Service agents quickly tackled him to the ground. He was down for what seemed like minutes as the crowd waited anxiously to see if he was alright. Though bleeding, he was alive—the would-be assassin f...

Did you hear about those weird secret symbols embedded into the layout of the 19th-century Bomberg Talmud? Or similar layouts, symbols and coded messages found throughout a medieval Christian book called the Glossa Ordinaria ? Oh come now, everyone has read Dan Brown. Those monks and rabbis were up to something. There must be a conspiracy “they” don’t want us to know about. Well, no, not really. I...

In 1951, media guru and secret medievalist Marshall McLuhan published his first book, The Mechanical Bride . His purpose was to encourage his readers to contemplate the way that advertising and technology shape society, both for the advertisers and for their targets – the buying public. The ladies of the Mosaic Ark have been contemplating McLuhan’s writings for several years now and it has shaped...