Mosaic Ark

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...

This month the ladies of the Mosaic Ark talked about the sin of pride in its various forms. As Providence would have it, our last stream on this topic occurred one day after the first US presidential debate, where two men sought to convince a nation to give one of them power. Was that debate informative or merely a display of pride? This question got us thinking of two other persons who also sough...

What does it mean to be proud to be an American? For that matter, what does it mean to be proud to be a German, or an Englishman? Is it pride in the homeland’s culture, language, history? And what of the bad things about its history, do those things negate pride in the nation as a whole? Also, what (and who) makes a nation? This week the ladies of the Mosaic Ark continued to discuss pride, particu...

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” These are the words of a proud being. In Milton’s Paradise Lost , Satan is cast out of Heaven, and in his pride boasts that he shall be a king in Hell. The question for the modern reader might well be this: what did Satan do differently than other rebellious people? If Paradise Lost were a modern movie, would Satan be the anti-hero that everyone love...

Pride. It is said that this was the sin that caused Lucifer to be cast down from Heaven, and the same temptation that he offered to Eve in his attempts to destroy her and Adam’s relationship with The Almighty – “Ye shall be like God.” But how does one explain to the people of a rapidly de-Christianizing society that pride is a sin, the most deadly of seven deadly sins, and something that should be...

The Professor asked KC if she could come up with some really stupid questions about the Middle Ages. “Can I? And how!” she said. “Did people bathe more than once a year? Did sanitation exist? Did anyone live past the age of 30? What about witchcraft? Were women thought to be witches because they were folk healers? How many witches were burned at the stake? For those women not burned at the stake,...

Is there hope for pagan America? What’s that? You didn’t know America was a pagan country?! If you’re like most people, you probably fall into one of two camps: you either think that America is a Christian country or that it is a secular country that practices a kind of religious pluralism, but both of those camps are wrong. John Daniel Davidson joined the ladies of the Mosaic Ark to discuss his n...

When we think of encampments, we may have militaristic visions of Crusader Kings like Baldwin IV and his thousands marching under banners and flags; we might see the Mongol empire marching behind the great Genghis Khan or perhaps Napoleon on his march through Europe. Conversely, we might see peaceful medieval tournaments with their tents and banners, religious pilgrimages or even their more modern...

“I heard my momma cry / I heard her pray the night Chicago died / Brother, what a night it really was / Brother, what a fight it really was / Glory be!” This song about fights between gangs and cops in 1920s Chicago was all the rage back in the 1970s. There’s a lot of appeal to nostalgia in it. But were people nostalgic for violence, or were they longing to be in a dramatic moment—a moment that ma...

Once upon a time in the Middle Ages, in a geographic area comprised of a patchwork collection of hundreds of separate Duchies ruled over by hundreds of Dukes, a loyalty was misplaced. Doesn’t sound like a very inspiring fairy tale, does it? But you must admit that it does sound similar to the current landscape of social media. There are hundreds of different platforms within larger platforms for s...

“A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Alexander Pope wrote these words in 1711 at the tender age of 22, and thereby created one of the understatements of the millennium. At least that is what the Dragon Common Room discovered as it began writing its first epic poem, Centrism Games . Join the Ladies of the Mosaic Ark as we discuss our admiration for Pope’s skill in writing satire in iambic pent...

“What is truth?” This question asked of Christ by Pilate 1,991 years ago seems to also be the question of this age. Five generations after women were granted the right to vote, every artistic endeavor (most notably in architecture) has changed for the worse and every institution has been morally compromised, nowhere more starkly than in relationships between men and women. The very foundations of...

“It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I feel fine.” Props to Michael Stipe. Eclipse 2024 happened, the world did not end, and everyone is feeling fine. This is good news! But why might some people have thought that something big was going to happen? Why were some people looking for significance in an entirely predictable event? Have there been significant events in history that occurred dur...

Did you hear the news? Christians of the Middle Ages hated the Jews, frequently accused them of murders they didn’t commit, and forced them to live in constant fear! Or at least, if you listened to Rabbi Michael Barclay schooling Candace Owens before she was subsequently “let go” by the Daily Wire , you would think exactly that. But in all of the rancor, and (if rumors are to be believed) damage c...

What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women? With all due respect to the mighty Conan, the women of the Mosaic Ark believe it is discussing the idea of God as a Tabletop RPG designer with the mighty Alexander Macris, who writes in Substack under the title "Contemplations on the Tree of Woe." In tonight’s stream, we discussed h...

January 6, 2021—The feast of the Epiphany in the Western Christian calendar, but was it also an epiphany for the country? That was the day that Jacob Angeli Chansley, also known as Q-Shaman, entered the Senate Chamber and invoked God in a prayer for America. Moments before, a member of the Capitol’s security who had escorted him there, told him that this place was “the sacredest space.” Sacred to...

In many ways, Dune 2 is an old-fashioned sword-and-sandals epic in the mold of Ben Hur . It has sweeping desert landscapes, costumed figures wearing robes flowing in the breeze, gladiatorial fights, and Greek-tragedy levels of dramatic exposition. In that sense, it is a real popcorn movie. But what if we told you that it was also a religious experience? This is what the Ladies of the Mosaic Ark co...

Two weeks ago the ladies of the Mosaic Ark discussed the interview of the century between Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin. This week, we looked at the body language of both men and asked what, if anything, could be inferred from it. Was Tucker in control of that interview, or did Putin take the reins? Was Putin nervous when he took off his watch, or was there something else to it? Is Putin an Al...

In February 2024, Tucker Carlson stood in front of the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow and announced his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some call Putin a brutal dictator with plans for military expansion after he invaded Ukraine. Some call Carlson a traitor for meeting with him. The two-hour long interview that aired on X included many questions and many layers of...