Elect Voters At the outset of his thoughtful “The Evangelical Voter” (February), John G. West complains that the Romney campaign did not do more to cultivate Evangelical support while it did establish “outreach groups” for Catholics and Jews. But this was

Most often the story is told like this: There is some feature of the world that science is at a loss to explain. Christians rush to claim that this feature can only be explained by God. Science later produces probable non-theistic hypotheses, and the Christia

In revealing himself, God was not merely concerned with sating our curiosity. His revelation sheds no special light on algebra or quantum mechanics. Instead, like a marriage proposal, it is an invitation—to intimacy with him, to love. And love finds expressio

My family had been in Brooklyn (or, as I will ever call it, God’s country) for over a century, refugees from the Lower East Side and a Jacob Riis–style life in early-twentieth-century New York. My father didn’t speak much about his youth in Bensonhurst, but w

The Tale of the Heike Translated by Royall Tyler Viking, 784 pages, $50 If you have ever read Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of Japanese tales Kwaidan, or seen Masaki Kobayashi’s brilliant film from 1965, you will recall “The Story of Mimi-nashi-Hïchi,” which

What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George Encounter, 168 pages, $15.99 No argument is more effective in promoting gay marriage than the insistence that its rejection offends our sense of justice an

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín Scribner, 81 pages, $19.99 All told, Mary utters only two hundred words in the Bible. We hear from her three times in Luke, at the Annunciation and the Visitation, and when she remonstrates with the twelve-year-old Jesus

• In second place but way behind the leader in a 3000-meter race, Iván Fernández Anaya pulled up when he realized his opponent had stopped before the finish line, thinking he’d won the race. He then, reports the newspaper El País, “stayed behind and, using ge

Yes, I remember Bourbon Street: The pulse of jazz; the girls (and boys Done up as girls) in clubs outside Which barkers make their ribald noise; The tourists slurping Hurricanes, That steel-toed boot kick of a drink That prettifies a brutal dose Of alcohol

In observance of National Poetry Month, every Friday of April Micah Mattix will be examining one great line of verse. -Ed. The final great line in this short series may seem an odd choice because, well, it’s not so great, at least on its own, in terms of e

The renowned New York Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips died earlier this month after over sixty years of city watching. He spent twenty-four years keeping an eye on the city for the New York Times, mainly from a perch in the metro bureau. In a news

Well, I think we can pack up this Christian thing and take the rest of the day off. That’s if what Charles Freeman writes in A New History of Early Christianity can be believed. Freeman’s book (2009) received only a brief review from First Things. For reas

Baseball and movies don’t often play well together. William Bendix as a Marine who dies happy in Guadalcanal Diary because he’s just heard that the Dodgers have won is an icon of 1940s Americana; the same William Bendix as the Bambino in The Babe Ruth Story i

Debate scholarships paid for a good part of my college education. Learning to make a coherent argument, buttress it using credible research, and defend it extemporaneously have been invaluable skills over the years. But I’m now wondering if my years of lab

Earlier this month, during a homily at morning Mass, Pope Francis’ gift for succinct but vivid instruction was on full display: “I don’t know why, but there is a dark joy in gossiping,” he said. “We slip into gossip, making the object of our chatter merchandi

What Does Bowdoin Teach? That’s the title of the 360-page report that my colleague Michael Toscano and I published on April 3. Coincidence gave us a nice round number of pages, but it was indeed our plan to compass Bowdoin College. We set out to create someth

We live in an era of unparalleled economic freedom. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, free markets have ruled without much in the way of resistance. As a consequence, for the most part our political problems now involve coming to terms with the global trium

Is it possible to embrace a gay identity and be a faithful Christian? All parties in the recent debate here at First Things agree that lifelong marriage between one man and one woman is the only morally appropriate context for a sexual relationship. But while

In observance of National Poetry Month, every Friday of April Micah Mattix will be examining one great line of verse. -Ed. You cannot have poetry without form, just as you cannot have prose fiction without narrative structure or drama without dialogue or a