The Unlikeliest Sentence You'll Read this Week:

"I went on a Louisiana hog hunt with a bunch of Episcopal priests."

Feral hogs in the cooler — this photo is in black and white so that you’ll keep reading 😘

What’s your image of an Episcopal priest? An effete man wearing tortoise-shell glasses, a tweed coat with elbow patches, and a clerical collar. If so, you wouldn’t be all wrong. I’ve met plenty who fit that very description.

And how about your image of feral hog in the swamps of north Louisiana? If you guessed nasty, smelly, and mean, you’d be about right.

The habitat of an Episcopal priests is a study full of leather-bound books, a cocktail in hand and a diploma on the wall. A feral pig, on the other hand, lives knee-deep in mud, rooting for tubers and worms and pretty much anything else edible by a mammal.

What I’m saying is: you wouldn’t expect to find a bunch of Episcopal priests wearing muck boots and post-holing through mud, AR-style rifles over their shoulders, hunting wild hogs. Yet that exactly what happened last week, and I was along for the ride.

The group of hunters and helpers at the 2025 Order of Naucratius Hog Hunt

How we got here is a long story. In fact, it goes back to the fourth century.