The Narthex

Monica Migliorino Miller’s article, “The Meaning of Feminine Submission” (Jan.-Feb.), deserves a grateful and respectful hearing because she takes Scripture seriously at the very place where many modern readers become either embarrassed by the text or eager to domesticate it into the moral language of the age. Her article succeeds…

On the night of April 14 and the early hours of April 15, 1912, the grandest ship on earth struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank in fewer than three hours, taking roughly 1,500 lives with her and drowning the proud language of an age in the frothy…

On March 6, 1981, Walter Cronkite concluded his final broadcast as anchor of CBS Evening News, and with that quiet farewell a chapter of American media culture gently closed. For nearly two decades, his voice entered millions of living rooms every evening with calm pacing, measured language, and disciplined restraint…

St. Francis Xavier is a figure whose legacy deserves far greater attention than it receives. The West often treats missionaries as peripheral figures who offered spiritual encouragement alongside colonial expansion, although this assumption reflects a failure to grasp the seismic anthropological impact Christian missionaries delivered in regions shaped by radically…

On March 4, 1933, a new presidential administration began during a severe economic collapse that had shaken every layer of American life. Banks had failed in waves. Industrial production had fallen dramatically. Unemployment approached 25 percent. Breadlines stretched through urban streets, and rural families faced relentless foreclosures that dismantled generational…

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…