profane

It’s the sacred and the profane — church and state, one might call them — presented as a unified whole.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2026

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

An opera disguised as an oratorio to get around the church’s ban on profane opera, the impolitic work about past and present is formed as the conflict between extravagance and sanctity.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 1, 2025

My dissertation gave a different shape to history, one that was neither Mormon nor anti-Mormon, neither spiritual nor profane.

From "Educated" by Tara Westover

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

When the wind is right, the indescribable perfume of some of the world's most thoroughly fermented tidal flats profanes the air.

From Time Magazine Archive

Amid the suburbs far away I deemed secure my dwelling lay, Yet now two nights my lone Serai A villain's step profanes.

From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845 by Various

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.

From New York Times ● Dec. 10, 2015

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

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

Gwynneth, who had not stirred a feature or a limb, started indignantly at the sound of a profaning step; but had forgiven Fuller before he reached her hand with his own outstretched.

From Peccavi by E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung