“The madness of crowds.” I’m sure everyone has heard that phrase before. It is often used to describe the behavior of mobs, as if the individual participants, through some mass psychosis contagion, cease to be individuals and act as one mad, destructive being. But is it true? On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies discuss the ongoing anti-ICE riots in LA, and take a walk down memory lane to remember some of the other riots in our country’s history, and how their similarities might point to a different explanation for the violence. —Streamed June 13, 2025

We’re not going to sugar coat this. The state of education is bleak. There seems to be a dense fog clouding the minds of students, who are incapable of reading seven randomly chosen paragraphs from a work of nineteenth-century serial fiction without understanding more than the basic facts presented in those paragraphs. Oh, sorry, my writing proficiency isn’t as good as my reading proficiency. I meant to say that there is a dense fog clouding the minds of certain college professors who don’t understand the irony of their own ambush. On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies discussed the newly-released study (of a ten-year-old test) given to 85 college English majors that was conducted by three college professors. The test was designed to code into an Excel spreadsheet the answers that students gave about their understanding of the text they were given to read, and the conclusion was that the students failed. Many tsk tsks were expressed and warnings given of how these failures’ future ability to make money was affected. In what can only be described as an exercise in irony, the text they tested the students on was from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Join us as we discuss how this may have been one of the biggest self-owns of the academic-industrial complex, and please add your thoughts to our discussion in the comments!—Streamed May 30, 2025

Take the test: https://fencingbearatprayer.substack.com/p/reading-comprehension-current-year

Habemus papam! We have a Pope! And not just any pope, we have an American pope, and an Augustinian one at that. Robert Francis Prevost, a priest of the Augustinian order, born and raised on the south side of Chicago, was elected to the Papacy on May 8, 2025. He took the name Pope Leo XIV, and some have wondered whether he took this name because he was inspired by the work of the last Pope Leo (XIII), who addressed modernism. And indeed, one of Pope Leo XIV’s first public comments introduced his thoughts on the dangers of AI. But the ladies of the Mosaic Ark were more interested in whether he would be influenced by the founder of his order, St. Augustine of Hippo, the most influential teacher of teachers in church history. Will Pope Leo XIV govern his church in an Augustinian way — a way that teaches how to be a Christian? And what does that mean? Watch as the ladies discuss on this week’s episode of the Mosaic Ark.—Streamed May 23, 2025

Augustine of Hippo, “On Catechizing the Uninstructed” https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1303.htm