Mosaic Ark

On this week’s Mosaic Ark, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown and Kimberly Crilly were very proud to announce the release of the second book in the Draco Alchemicus series, Act 2: The Court. Listen as they read excerpts of this second installment in the Dragon Common Room’s epic poem and talk about their inspirations when creating it. They also discussed their writing process, including: what it’s like to write as a team, some good tips...

“Hail Mary full of grace, punch the devil in the face.” So says the popular meme that goes alongside a medieval illustration of Mary, the mother of Christ, literally punching the devil in the face. Does this sound childish simply because it rhymes? Allow Professor Rachel Fulton Brown and KC to disabuse you of that notion as we welcome Dr. Keith Berubé, author of Mary: The Rosary, The Relationship, and Dragons. Dr. Berubé joined us ...

On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies were joined by Catholic poet Sally Read, who discussed her journey as a writer. Though she started her career as a psychiatric nurse and atheist co-writing a book about women’s experiences with their physical bodies, she became a poet and a Christian through her own unique spiritual experiences which she happily shared with us. Sally also shared with us some of her favorite Catholic poems from ...

Dr. Hans G. Schantz joins the Professor for a virtual roadtrip through the history of electromagnetism. Along the way, we remark on the importance of studying history for catching the errors in the science, review the significance of Harold Innis's insights into the media effects on space and time, wonder about the role of monasticism in the origins of Western industry, and marvel at the beauty of the machines that are remaking our...

You might have heard about the humorous meme making its way around the internet over the past several years which states, “We revolted against the British because they taxed our breakfast beverage.” Well, yes and no. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t really about the tea, or the tiny tax on the tea. It was about taxation without representation. But where did the American colonists get the idea that they were entitled to representation?! Wha...

In the very entertaining 1996 summer blockbuster movie “Independence Day,” President Whitmore is told of the alien tech that has been hidden and studied in Area 51 for years, the cost of which was hidden through stories planted in the media about creative accounting. Hollywood has come out with some science fiction bangers over the past 75 years, and sometimes as art does, it has mirrored the hopes and fears of the general populati...

On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the Professor and KC talk about the McLuhan space we currently inhabit, where “the medium is the message.” The world is in the midst of a digital revolution with the introduction of very rapidly improving “artificial intelligence,” where the gathering and dissemination of information both audio and visual is occurring at the speed of a self-replicating virus. While this world of AI is clearly the medium b...

On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies were joined by Catholic artist Joseph Maki. Inspired by the great European craftsmen who built the churches of the Middle Ages, Joseph is a woodworker and sculptor who creates beautiful works of art that hold a sacred purpose within the Catholic Mass. We spoke about his motivations for taking on this vocation, and also about his inspirations, including his love of Catholic traditions and of the...

Why do men hold on so tightly to myths that have been scientifically disproven, defending them with the religious fervor of a nineteenth-century high church Anglican? On this week’s Mosaic Ark, we discussed the tale of two such men. Both challenged their church’s teachings; one proved that humans could develop over time, and the other was Charles Darwin. Listen as we discuss how St. John Henry Newman’s conclusion that Catholic doc...

Was the world of Middle Earth, created by JRR Tolkien, Christian? Would it help answering that question to know that Tolkien’s initials were actually JRPRT, and that the “P” was for Phillip, more specifically his patron saint, Philip Neri? Or that Tolkien studied under Father Morgan at the Birmingham Oratory, who studied under St. John Henry Newman? “So Tolkien was Catholic, so what? He just wrote a fantasy story about magic based ...

On this week’s Mosaic Ark, we spoke with Tyler Hummel about his new book, Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie? And Other Questions About The True Meaning of Christmas Films. What started out as an amusing observation that many people considered Die Hard to be their favorite Christmas film led Tyler to wonder what kinds of stories actually make a film into a “Christmas film.” Is it that it has the story of Christ’s birth at the center? Is...

The debate has been raging over the past week. Does presenting evil or immoral material in literature or movies cause people to be desensitized to it, or even to seek it out? Did we say the past week? We’re sorry, we meant to say that this debate has been raging over the past 160 years, ever since Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, help create a new genre called children’s literature. Carroll wrote stories which would later col...

This week the ladies of the Mosaic Ark are back after a four-week break just in time to obsess over the first installment of the final season of Stranger Things. Along with other obsessive fans in the world, we’ve been engaging in conjectures about the direction of the story and how it will end. But as writers, we also found ourselves obsessing over the depth of the story’s structure and the many clues to Henry’s backstory. We love...

What makes a monster a monster? In this episode, we continue our discussion of Stranger Things, focusing appropriately enough for Halloween night on the monsters. From the Demogorgon of season 1, to Henry Creel’s transformation into Vecna in season 4, we tried to determine exactly why each of the monsters worked as vectors of horror. Why was the Demogorgon terrifying? Why was the body horror of the Mind Flayer so resonant? Why was ...

On last week’s episode of The Mosaic Ark, the ladies were reveling in the nostalgia of the 1980s that Stranger Things presents; this week we wondered how to pinpoint the source of that strong nostalgic feeling. Though the show takes place during what were our high school years, the time period itself was not solely the source of the nostalgia; if it were, Stranger Things wouldn’t have as many young fans as it does. So what is it th...

What story are we in? This is the question the ladies of the Mosaic Ark asked ourselves while watching Season 1 of the Duffer Brothers’ amazing series, Stranger Things. As everyone knows, it is a nostalgic trip back to the early 1980s with strong elements from the movies of Steven King, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott. But what kind of horror story is it? Is it one where the characters live in a place that is evil just under the...

This week the ladies of the Mosaic Ark welcomed Professor Robert J. Dobie aboard to discuss his book The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation. Dobie is a Professor and Chair of Philosophy at LaSalle University in Philadelphia. He specializes in the medieval philosophers, but has had a fascination with Tolkien since he first read The Lord of the Rings when he was twelve. Professor Dobie believes that, t...

On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies continued their discussion of “The Dream of Scipio,” that short, narrative work written by Cicero which served as an instructive parable about civic duty to the citizens of Rome. However mundane that purpose may have been, its descriptions of what Romans believed about the physical universe and religion are fascinating in their familiarity. Cicero used these images in his parable because his au...

In Acts, St. Paul talked of prophesy and visions and dreams, and so these are very Christian actions; yes? But in the Roman orator Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” Cicero writes of both a vision and a prophesy that was experienced by the pagan Scipio in his dream. This work presented a model of creation and the creator that is very close to what Christians living a century later would profess. Does this mean that pagans and Christians ...