President Trump’s pattern of renaming public institutions and government programs after himself — from the U.S. Institute of Peace to the Kennedy Center, from a new class of battleships to prescription drug benefits and children’s savings accounts — seems to offer a good contemporary illustration of what the Bible calls “the pride of life.” In warning against loving “the things of the world,” the Apostle John identifies a spiritual danger that transcends any era: the human temptation to seek immortality and significance through the perpetuation of one’s own name. This self-glorifying impulse, which transforms public institutions meant to serve the common good into monuments to individual ego, exemplifies the kind of worldly vanity that Biblical teaching warns against.