profane

The author also notes a telling detail: Abolitionists such as Douglass often chose to speak on July 5, not the Fourth itself, regarding the official celebration as compromised, even profane.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 22, 2026

On a never-ending feed we watch the cute and profane, sleepwalking toward an emotional state beyond shock as entertainment: the banality of passive consumption.

From Slate ● May 12, 2026

It operates at the intersections of pop art and high-ish art, of the sacred and profane, of radicalism and die-hardism.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 1, 2025

In 1431, the ecumenical Council of Basel ordered the deans and rectors of churches to expel "frivolities" and "profane abuses" from holy buildings, but implicitly allowed them to take place in the squares outside.

From Salon ● Dec. 24, 2024

It was, Darwin knew, an explicitly profane diagram.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee

It reads: “He that violates his oath profanes the divinity of faith itself.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 15, 2022

It profanes and pulverizes any claim she might have on representing the interests of mothers and children.

From The New Yorker ● Jun. 1, 2018

It is just not true that all today's modern art despises or profanes the past.

From The Guardian ● Apr. 18, 2013

The climax comes when Charlie puts the house up for sale, profanes their devotions, and triumphantly vilifies mother.

From Time Magazine Archive

No beadle here impounds you, to suit his crabbed mood; No strife profanes our little church, tho' there it rages high, But then we have no little church, and that, perhaps, is why!

From The World's Greatest Books — Volume 01 — Fiction by Sir John Alexander Hammerton

This is both a twilight and a twilight zone; every virtue is a simulation of itself, a hollow or profaned image.

From The New Yorker ● May 21, 2019

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

From The Guardian ● Aug. 7, 2015

When the call comes from Chau that set this scene in motion, as Mike plays with Kaylee, we feel with him how his one last standing temple has been profaned.

From Salon ● Jul. 23, 2012

Yet the opera’s few tender moments, set to what seemed like profaned echoes of Wagner’s “Tristan,” had a warmth that was gripping.

From New York Times ● May 9, 2010

Everest, the purists sniffed, had been debased and profaned.

From "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer

This bears mentioning since Hargitay opened Monday’s Emmys telecast by performing “I Love TV Screens,” profaning Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll” in doing so.

From Salon ● Sep. 15, 2026

And of course there were important rules about the worship of Yahweh, including loving him, fearing him, emulating him, and not profaning his name.

From Textbooks ● Apr. 19, 2023

“Some have even claimed that only by being here, by my presence, I am traumatizing the Kercher family again, and profaning Meredith’s memory. They are wrong.”

From Seattle Times ● Jun. 15, 2019

This task is made more difficult by the novelist’s mustache-twirling contempt for profaning fiction with reality.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 17, 2018

For they wished to confer dignities and other benefices and take the fruits, thereby profaning the sanctuary of God.

From Béarn and the Pyrenees A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre by Louisa Stuart Costello