The Narthex

Monosodium glutamate, or MSG, was in just about everything at the Chinese restaurants I went to growing up. The idea of MSG is that it enhances, or is supposed to, the flavors already present in the dishes being prepared. A Japanese scientist named Ikeda Kikunae discovered MSG more than a…

The New York Times likes occasionally to run articles about “gray divorce,” i.e., the phenomenon of people 50+ splitting up. Case in point: its approving commentary on June 22, “Older Adults Are No Longer Staying in ‘Empty-Shell’ Marriages” (linked below). It reads, "[N]early 40 percent of divorces today occur between…

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…

Marriage is very much under assault in the Western world, in part by false notions of “freedom” that assume a person’s choices can reconstruct the nature and definition of marriage. Poland is one place where that assault is underway. Although the Polish Constitution defines marriage as a man-woman relationship, the…

“Textualism” and “originalism” emerged as approaches to interpreting the Constitution in order to reconnect American judicial decisions with the document they were supposedly applying. The “living Constitution,” so in vogue from roughly the 1950s through 2000 (though not really firmly buried until Anthony Kennedy finally left the Supreme Court), unfettered…

A recent TikTok video posted to X is ostensibly the work of a white mother explaining to her 10-year-old the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. The woman claims that her child asked what differentiated the two and that she explained it by using an analogy involving the homeless.…

When we celebrate a Catholic wedding, we do so for more than the couple marrying. We do so for all those present. The same is true for baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, and Holy Orders. How many of the people present to witness a Catholic marriage are not Christian, are Christian…

Thomas J. Burns reported the number of Catholic marriages -- in which Catholics administer the Sacrament of Matrimony to each other -- in the United States in five-year intervals in a July 5, 2023, report. His numbers were obtained from annual statistics gathered by the Center for Applied Research in…

Do you know what a “stander” is? A “stander” is apparently the left-behind spouse after a divorce who, nevertheless, remains faithful to his or her marriage vows despite abandonment by the other party. I had never heard that term until I read Leila Miller’s great essay, “Six Uncomfortable Facts about…

June third is observed in France as the feast of St. Clotilde. She was the 5th-century wife of Clovis, pagan king of the Franks. Clotilde was a Catholic, an orthodox one at a time Arianism still had some following in what we now call France. The Franks were a Germanic…

In 2018 the American Spectator published an essay of mine which included a list of 185 songs I had identified as music that promotes marriage, not just enduring love but also forgiveness and reconciliation within marriage (the list is linked at the bottom of this post). Like most of us,…

April 1 … is more than “April Fool’s Day.” It’s the end of the first quarter of the year. Ninety days of 2025 down. Last year I made a point of marking each quarter of the year to invite readers to consider what they’d done (or not done) with New…

Marty is a great film, both for National Marriage Week (February 7-14) and for Valentine’s Day weekend. Even though it is 71 years old, it’s telling to see what’s changed -- and what hasn’t -- since 1954. (And, I'll admit, there's something about black-and-white films.) Marty (played by Ernest Borgnine) is…

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his important book After Virtue, suggests what the world needs today is “another -- doubtless very different -- Saint Benedict.” Some might argue that Pope Benedict XVI was that new “Benedict” speaking to the modern world. I’d like to suggest what the world needs today is a…

The patria potestas was a legal power held by fathers in the Roman Empire. If you think that Tiberius was just dad in a toga, think again. In Roman law, a father had rights over his family, including the right of who could bear his name. If, therefore, a child…