The Narthex

John Michael Osbourne died in England a few days ago. According to a family statement as reported by Fox News, Osbourne died with his family by his side, “surrounded by love.” The world knew Osbourne not as John Michael but as Ozzy. For decades Ozzy Osbourne was the frontman of…

News sites and gossip boards are spilling over with talk about Jeffrey Epstein. The American government, one of the most morally debased institutions to ever exist, is busy denying what is obvious to almost everyone else. Epstein (1953-2019) was a human trafficker, sex abuser, blackmailer, and probably double or triple…

State violence is often framed by its authors as education. Time and again we witness presidents, prime ministers, junta bosses, and lesser leaders of nominally government bodies take to the airwaves to announce that a bombing, an invasion, or an assassination is meant to be “a lesson” to the enemy…

Politics and hypocrisy are rarely, if ever, parted. Godliness and politics, by contrast, are rarely, if ever, joined, especially not in the country of my birth. These two truisms have perhaps never been on dual display as glaringly as during the first half of June. At the level of political…

A family friend died last year. It fell, in part, to me to sort through his belongings. While helping his widow clean out his desk we found several shoeboxes filled with pills, ointments, powders, and other medications. We also found reams of prescription notes, guidelines for medicine use, doctor’s appointment…

In March of 2023, notorious transgender TikToker Dylan Mulvaney gushed to talk show host Drew Barrymore about the importance of surrounding oneself with good people. Barrymore clearly fit the description, in his view, because she spent much of the interview kneeling before him in worshipful adulation. Who would not want…

When I was a kid, I loved watching a show called This Old House. When I recently checked the PBS website for This Old House I didn’t recognize any of the cast members -- a reminder that I haven’t lived in the U.S. for a very long time, and that…

The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom recently ruled that the legal definition of a woman is someone who is biologically female. In the United States, a return to sanity from the madhouse of transgenderism is apparent in our Supreme Court’s recent ruling that people who believe they were born…

A recent documentary by cultural commentator Matt Walsh asks the question of the age in its title: “What Is a Woman?” In the documentary [link to trailer here], Walsh poses this question to a range of people, from gender activists and self-styled gender experts to average men and women.…

We moderns hear a lot about miracles. Modern medicine is a miracle, we’re told. Landing rovers on Mars, or on distant asteroids, requires a miraculous degree of technological sophistication. Marvels—miracles’ kid brothers—are a dime a dozen in 2023. Video phones, space telescopes, ChatGPT. Wow. Aren’t we human beings special. Miraculous,…

An 18-year-old woman named Layla Jane was in the news recently with a heartbreaking story. Ms. Jane is suing Kaiser Permanente and another medical institution for performing a double mastectomy on her at the age of 13. (Her story has been covered by several national news organizations.) There was nothing…

Some ten years ago I was invited to what was billed as a “gender reveal.” It was a dinner at a local Italian restaurant, complete with dessert in the form of an iced cake, the pink or blue inside of which would reveal the sex of the host couple's unborn…

As part of research for a separate project, I recently came across this ten-minute video about shell-shocked soldiers from World War I; it’s gut-wrenching but ought to be seen by everyone (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvTRJZGWqF8). It shows men twisted and deformed, body and mind, by the horror of war. I had…

Over the past few years, a number of academic brouhahas has drawn me into checking what professors tweet. Almost all of it is ugly. Within two or three tweets the online exchanges between Professor A and Professor B, or between Professor A and Concerned Citizen B, have devolved into wild…

In July, a grisly video made the evening news. The video—apparently real—shows a Ukrainian prisoner of war being tortured by Chechen soldiers fighting for the Russian military. The Chechens castrate the Ukrainian prisoner with a box cutter and then shoot him dead. People in modern societies comfort themselves with the…