B. D. McClay

At Heart of Arvo Pärt’s Works, Eastern Orthodox Christianity
William Robin, New York Times

Black Mass Media
Magus Peter H. Gilmore, Church of Satan

Reputation is a Funny Thing
Michael Robbins, Poetry

Sign Painters
Will Perkins, Art of the Title

Mass Murder Relies on People Like Us: An Interview With Thierry Cruvellier
Philip Gourevitch, New Yorker

The Literature of the Standing Desk
Dominic Smith, The Millions

How Catholic Fashion Got That Way
Ruth Graham, Boston Globe

The Toilet Papers
Jeremy Keehn, The Walrus

Why is Mansfield Park Jane Austen’s Best Book?
Amateur Reader, Wuthering Expectations

The Devil’s News
Mary Valle, Killing the Buddha

What Does Religion Look Like in Prison?
Casey N. Cep, Pacific Standard

Will the Movies Ever Catch Up to H.R. Giger?
Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly

Play, Dammit
Heather Havrilesky, The Baffler

In the Image of God: John Comenius and the First Children’s Picture Book
Charles McNamara, Public Domain Review

People Who Eat People: Hannibal and TV’s New Darkness
Lynn Coady, Hazlitt

Some years ago, I read much of Perry Miller’s The American Puritans for a class. I came away from it with an appreciation both for the deep beauty of Puritan English and for the Puritans themselves, people who found morality and civic life serious enough matters that they dedicated great care to them. Continue Reading »

If you happen to be reading Moby Dick right now, and you live in Washington, DC, congratulations! The Kennedy Center is putting on an opera. Go see it (it closes tomorrow). If you don’t live in DC, however, and you live in some benighted cultural desert (like New York City) then nobody is . . . . Continue Reading »

As we absorb the news of Pope Francis’s latest escapade—he accidentally cursed in front of an adoring audience—we are faced with a difficult but unavoidable truth. And that truth is: Pope Francis and Jennifer Lawrence are the same person. Continue Reading »

The February issue of First Things has been live for a little bit now, but you might have missed it in all the website changes. But since the February issue is very good, that would be a shame. Continue Reading »

For three more days, courtesy of BBC 4, you can listen to the soothing voice of Jeremy Irons reading T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Continue Reading »

Hello, good readers of the First Things website. Here is a brief reminder (for those of you who know) and a guide (for those of you who do not). Continue Reading »

At Postmodern Conservative, Carl Scott continues to talk about the decline of the English major.Peter Leithart is reading about: Christian kings (more here), morphic resonance, and bees.Here at First Thoughts, Greg Forster comments on the politics quiz, William Randolph Brafford offers a very short . . . . Continue Reading »