The Narthex

It is written: He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Donald Trump has spent the last four years running his presidential administration as an extension of his wrestling career. He has blustered and play-acted his way through the duties of the office, and trafficked in late-night…

In December, a U.S. abortion clinic employee tweeted a photo of his Christmas tree, topped not with a Christmas star but with a pair of forceps used to extract dismembered babies from the womb during abortion procedures. A week or so later, The Satanic Temple revealed its billboards in Texas…

A great man has died. Dr. Hasuda Taiji (1936-2020) passed away in late October, leaving behind many iterations around the world of the thing for which he will always be remembered: a hole in the wall. Dr. Hasuda was an ob-gyn at the Jikei Byōin (“Mercy Hospital”) in Kumamoto, Japan.…

When I hear “Q,” I think of Quelle. Quelle is the German word for “source.” Philologists in the early twentieth century who studied the Synoptic Gospels (the Gospel of St. John is obviously sui generis, but the Gospels of Sts. Matthew, Mark, and Luke often overlap) began to wonder whether…

Religion ought to have sheltered American democracy from the dangers of irreligion, as de Tocqueville famously observed, but it did not. This practical failure of religion in part explains the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016. Trump’s supporters are not as anxious about the fate of their country—although, to…