The Narthex

President’s Day arrives every February with historical aura but then gets swallowed by appliance discounts and mattress commercials, as though civic memory can be replaced by a coupon code. The holiday has become a soft cultural placeholder, a day people “enjoy” while forgetting what it was meant to teach. The…

American political mythology often introduces the Founders as secular craftsmen who constructed a democratic republic through sheer Enlightenment grit. Yet any careful reading of their correspondence reveals that these men never imagined a public order severed from divine authority. They lived in a world where appeals to Heaven were considered…

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of "Common Sense," a slender pamphlet whose physical modesty concealed a civilizational provocation. On a winter day in 1776, an obscure British immigrant named Thomas Paine released a text that redirected the political trajectory of an entire people. Within three months,…

The image of a bride exchanging rings with a figure floating inside augmented reality glasses appears at first glance as a novelty item suited for a slow news cycle, and many readers understandably smirk and scroll on. Nevertheless, when Yurina Noguchi, a 32-year-old Japanese woman, donned a wedding dress and…

Modern Christians consume historical narratives the way they consume streaming services: with restless impatience and very little context. Every crisis arrives framed by pundits, platforms, and political tribes. The result is a kind of spiritual vertigo. Many believers feel disoriented by the pace of events yet still interpret those events…

Chivalry did not appear out of nowhere. It is not the random invention of medieval knights or a quaint code of courtly behavior borrowed from troubadours and tournaments. Its roots lie much deeper -- in the bedrock of the natural law and the moral architecture of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Before…

There are days when the heavens seem to hum in sympathy with a man’s life. October 17, 1849, was such a day. Frédéric Chopin — Polish patriot, melancholic genius, frail romantic — died in Paris at age 39. His last wish was that Mozart’s Requiem be played at his funeral,…

The recent swearing in of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani on the Quran has reignited a conversation that America prefers to keep comfortably superficial. Thus, public debate has circled symbols, optics, and inclusivity language while missing the heavier matter that involves history, Scripture, and moral philosophy. In recent years the…

On Christmas Day, holy and radiant, we stand at the turning point of all human longing, a longing that began at the gates of Eden and echoed through every generation that followed. From the first moment of rupture between God and man, the world has carried a deep ache for…

Truth being under siege, the university -- once the Church’s cathedral of the intellect -- has become a temple to relativism, technocracy, and soulless pragmatism. The modern university no longer forms souls; it programs consumers. Once the glory of Christendom, our institutions of higher learning now echo with the nihilistic…

December 15, 1791, stands as a quiet hinge of history, since on that day the ratification of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution achieved final assent through Virginia’s approval, thereby giving formal civic expression to an idea whose roots run far deeper than Philadelphia, deeper than Enlightenment…