Picture a Franciscan praying, and the Poverello of Assisi comes to mind: a coarse-robed friar, alone in the woods, arms outstretched to heaven. Picture a Benedictine or Carthusian, and Into Great Silence resonates: a tonsured monk, reciting psalms in a darkened choir stall. Picture a Jesuit, a plain-clothed priest meditating imaginatively on the Gospels; or a Missionary of Charity, a sari-clad nun contemplating the cry of the Crucified. Each gives a glimpse into the diverse richness of life in Christ.

Picturing a Dominican in prayer is more difficult. Called to preach, the Dominican forms his minds through ongoing study—an intense quest for truth. But, as Fr. John Vidmar, OP, shows the lay reader in this newly published little volume, Dominican spirituality is about more than the life of the mind. It is, in essence, about the life of the whole person–as relevant now as it was in the thirteenth century.

Dominic founded his order of mendicant preachers to counter the raging anti-worldly dualism of the Albigensian heresy. “It seems impossible to recall these men to the Faith by words alone,” he realized. “We must attack them rather by our example.” Thus, while living a life of apostolic poverty, he and his friars sought to affirm the goodness of the created world.

We should pray bowing, prostrating, kneeling, standing, reading, thinking, says an early manuscript on Dominic’s ways of prayer; prayer uses the mind in unity with the body. As Conrad Pepler, twentieth-century Dominican theologian, reiterates: “It is not prayer when I merely weave theological pattern out of the truths of faith; but it is prayer when, contemplating God revealed to me, I find him to be so loveable that my heart longs for his company.”

In what has become a Dominican motto, Thomas Aquinas urged his fellow preachers to “contemplate and share the fruits of contemplation.” It’s a powerful merging of the vita contemplata and the vita activa: Giving birth to the divine Word, and presenting him to the world. Moreover, it is an ideal that all Christians can, and should, aspire to—the call of discipleship.

Speaking of Obama, as I was walking to the grocery store last night, I noticed a fashionably dressed elderly woman wearing a shirt that read: “Obama is the New America.”

The New America? What exactly are we voting for in November? A new energy policy or a new foreign policy, or a new country altogether? What about the old America? What about baseball and crackerjacks?

After some occasionally over-fevered speculation, Nature magazine, in its July 31 issue, finally announced the newest findings of the research team trying to decipher the Antikythera mechanism:

The mechanism is an odd ancient device, discovered in the 1902 exploration of a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. Made of bronze, it’s 13 inches high, 6.7 inches wide, and an astonishingly thin 3.5 inches thick, packed with gear wheels and covered with strange inscriptions.

Major work on reconstructing the device has been done, off and on, since 1959, establishing that it was some kind of astronomical calculator, probably dating from the 2nd century B.C. The latest work adds some interesting detail, particularly the fact that it included a dial for determining when the Olympic Games were to be held. And, better yet, that the mechanism was inscribed with names from the calendar used in the western end of the Greek world—and thus is quite possibly from Syracuse, home of Archimedes, who wrote a lost book on astronomical devices, called On Sphere-Making.

Great stuff, isn’t it? And here’s a video describing the new work. I don’t know precisely why these sorts of things please me so much, but it has something to do with the purity of their search for knowledge.