The Narthex

Being a college teacher was a pretty good job back in the good old days. Why? Because it was easy to know when students were cheating. Exams were a cinch. Students sitting in desks in a classroom seem to believe they are surrounded by a dome of invisibility, but the…

A few days ago I was watching the boring stock market channel on TV in Japan when there appeared on the screen a commercial for an investment product. Not earth-shattering news, I know. But there was something about the commercial that threw me for a loop. The investment product, which…

Even before the thrilling movie 300 (2006), many Westerners were familiar with the even more thrilling history of the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC). At the “hot gates,” the historical record tells us, Spartan king Leonidas I led his fellow Greeks against a much bigger invading force under “King of…

A family member recently moved from a small town in Alabama to an even smaller town in the South Pacific. Worlds apart, you might think. Whole continents and oceans, and the infinite interplay of historical and cultural time, separate the land of the Cherokee syllabary and the Appalachian banjo from…

In Persian Gulf countries, missiles, drones, and cluster bombs are falling from the sky in wave after wave. Innocent people huddle in basements and apartment buildings, praying they will not be blown up. Reciprocal murder spirals out of control, and now there is talk of sending in American ground forces…

People who march in protest of one or another alleged abuse of the natural world often carry signs reading “There Is No Planet B.” What they mean is that this is the only planet we’ve got, and so we’d better take care of it. Fair enough, I guess. Turning off…

When millions of pages of documents and photographs were released revealing who among the world’s so-called “elite” had been cavorting with sex-trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, many of those whose names and faces appeared in the caches scrambled to control the damage. Lawrence Summers, for example, who once swayed world economic…

Bombs are falling on Iran. In this act of naked aggression many see the contours of another murderous rampage: the invasion of Iraq 23 years ago, which like the Iran adventure was also unwarranted chaos predicated on a tissue of lies. Here we go again, the war-weary American public groans.…

In verses ten through twelve of Isaiah chapter 58, the Lord speaks through the prophet:

And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day: and the Lord…

Not too long ago, Republicans were the party of free speech. Tired of being shut out of debates and shut up about everything, they styled themselves as free speech champions while trying to claw back some traction in the groves of academe and the halls of political power. But then…

Time magazine fulminated this month about the rise of the trillionaires. In October, the Brookings Institute deep-dived into the rise of stablecoins. The Economist gave us their thoughts on the rise of singlehood. Straight Arrow News had a think piece on the rise of “Kirkifying” in the wake of the…

Pope Leo XIV recently dabbled in one of his predecessor’s old tricks. At an October 1 event at Castel Gandolfo celebrating the tenth anniversary of the late Francis’s paean to Mother Earth, Laudato Si’, Pope Leo got up to some highly questionable shenanigans with Arnold Schwarzenegger (famous for his movie…

“Our democracy” is in peril, we are told, endlessly, by pundits and politicians. A Supreme Court justice, talking heads, politicians, and academics have come out as worriers about the state of democratic politics. Even a former pope did so. In the United States, histrionics about “our democracy” have reached a pitch…

Leftists are the progressive people. They have moved on from hateful Biblical morality and old-fashioned notions of sin and redemption. They believe in liberation, more and more of it. People are basically good, just insufficiently liberated. Fallen creatures may need weapons to defend themselves from those who would do evil,…

On August 22, 2025, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton, national security advisor during the first Trump administration and, later, trenchant critic of his former boss. The feds were apparently on a mission to protect classified documents, the same mission the FBI claimed to be carrying out when…