Mosaic Ark

What are the Rules of civility for persons of quality? Are they an outdated holdover from the Ancien Régime? Archaic manners designed for Lords and Ladies, obsequiously bowing before their King? Or if you prefer a more American, egalitarian example: are these rules for civility only followed by wealthy people in gated mansions and country clubs as a means of social exclusion? The ladies of the Mos...

What makes good poetry? Is it rhyme, meter, meaning, resonance? Maybe it’s alliteration. Then again maybe it’s imagery or story or emotion. Could it be all of these things? And does a good poet come by inspiration through luck, or blessings from God? Carl Winderl, author of the poetic books The Gospel According to…Mary and The Lost Parables of Jesus , joined the ladies on this week’s Mosaic Ark, a...

Happy Pie Day! Tonight the Ladies of the Mosaic Ark hijacked International Pi day to discuss how one defines things such as pie, or people, or nations. Specifically we discussed the English nation and wondered where they went and what defined them as a people. They are one of the best examples to show how difficult it is to define a nation. Is it blood? Borders? Language? Songs? Stories? In the ca...

“You can be a lover or a fighter, whatever you desire / Whatever you want, baby, choose your fighter!” —Ava Max. This past week saw a group of Congresswomen in a viral video called “Choose Your Fighter,” wherein they each appeared well dressed in smart suits, smiling and jumping with fists in the air as they pretended to strike a boxing pose. The visual rhetoric was clear; these women were “fighte...

What is a factory worker, a man or a woman? What is a CEO? Same question. No one asks these questions anymore. Thanks to the feminist movement of the last 50 years, those kinds of questions don’t matter because a woman can be anything she wants! Yay, women! Also, men can be anything they want, including, apparently, women. But what is a woman? This week, the ladies of the Mosaic Ark continued thei...

What is a nation? Over the past several weeks, we’ve struggled to come up with an answer that will satisfy everyone, and so this week we decided to tackle an easier question. What is a sandwich? Easy! It is some kind of protein between two pieces of bread, created by none other than that illustrious Englishman, the Earl of Sandwich. But wait a minute. Is a taco a sandwich? What about a hamburger?...

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? KC the realist would say “Yes. The forest and the tree and soundwaves exist irrespective of my presence.” A nominalist would say, “The forest only exists as a category of your mind. Only individual trees exist.” Professor Rachel Fulton Brown would say, “The medieval nominalists are the reason we are having a...

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...