It seems like everyone knows a narcissist these days. It isn’t a term I really thought about a decade ago. After I left a teaching position with a corrupt president, I started hearing people refer to him as a Narcissist. I also have a sister about whom we used to say, “She just can’t see beyond herself.” It was always a benign issue… until it wasn’t. Over the years, I realized the narcissism there. It was painfully demonstrated to me.

With those experiences, I’ve done a bit of research over the last few years on narcissism. But, the religious aspect of narcissism has always been hard for me to grasp. The heart of living the Christian faith is to look beyond yourself. The narcissists in my life have been religious and will eagerly tell you about how much service for others they do.

This weekend, I ran across an older article from the Washington Post that had the following quote:

[S]ome true narcissists are obsessed with helping other people — kind of self-aggrandizement through martyrdom. We’ve all met people like this, Craig Malkin, author of “Rethinking Narcissism,” tells Webber — “self-sacrificing to the point where you can’t stand to be in the room with them.”...