All spring she brushed aside my arguments that it was cheaper and would make more sense to fill the yard with hardy Yankee stock. She bought her maple, junked the chain-link fence, and tried to start a lawn; our crabby flock of grackles grew too fat on seed t

Sergeant Dwayne Miller’s breath came quick and his jaw clenched as he began relating a story to me at a combat outpost in northern Helmand Province, Afghanistan. We sat in the moon dust on camp chairs that some folks from my hometown had sent for the Fourth o

For the better part of a century, Carl Jung and (later) his estate kept the manuscript of his unfinished Red Book—or Liber Novus, as he originally entitled it—hidden safely away from public scrutiny. Jung’s most ardent admirers, making their hopeful pilgrim

From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Human Origins in the Light of Creation and Evolution by Brendan Purcell New City Press, 370 pages, $34.95 Benjamin Disraeli famously asked whether man is “an ape or an angel” and answered that he himself stood “on the side of

I rarely pray to Christ. His sacrifice was so perfect, it’s far beyond my ken. I’m one of those who have denied Him thrice but take His bread and wine, then say amen. I pray three ways, first to the Holy Ghost in charge of poets who would serve the Lord, th

• “New Yorkers are so rude,” declared our midwestern friend. Who, it turned out, had never been to New York. She knew New Yorkers are rude because everyone knows New Yorkers are rude. That has not been our experience, as recent immigrants to the city. Brusqu

For many years, traditionalist thinkers have promoted the teaching of a set of core texts—the “great books”—as a vital element of a liberal arts education during a time when demands for multiculturalism led to the dismantling of a number of traditional progra

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy by Andrew Preston Knopf, 832 pages, $37.50 America, G. K. Chesterton famously observed, is “a nation with the soul of a church.” In his masterful new survey Sword of the Spirit,

Friedrich Engels was a prophet of marriage in the modern age. Monogamous marriage, he declared in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in 1884, is “unnatural,” setting the practical against the genuinely emotional, reducing per

ROME—When Pope Francis stepped out onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s on the night of March 13, I thought of the man I had met in his Buenos Aires office ten months before: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., who was looking forward to laying down the b

America is under attack in the pages of First Things. In a recent article Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen tells us that America is founded on a philosophy of “unsustainable liberalism.” Implicit in the ideas of the American founding, he argues, are certai

Wendell Berry’s recent self-described “general declaration” in support of “homosexual marriage” shocked many, fans and critics alike. Berry, who once wrote that marriage “cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance” and has long argued that marriage

“My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not as I will, but as you will,” prays Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Many sermons and commentaries take Jesus’ prayer to be a prayer to the Father to avoid the cross, “if it is possible.” Thi

This is a frustrating moment if you believe in limited government. The statist left seems to be ascendant. We are on the path to a full government takeover of healthcare as premiums rise and Obamacare unravels the system of employer-provided health insurance.

From the moment he walked out onto the Vatican balcony following the papal election, Jorge Mario Bergoglio forged an image all his own. Having lived a life of simplicity, the new Pope Francis wasn’t about to abandon it, even with the honor and prestige his ne

Preaching to the deaf is a venerable prophetic vocation. Isaiah was told that his prophecies to the “dull of hearing” would only make them duller, and Jeremiah was warned that the “foolish and senseless” of Judah “have ears but do not hear.” Jesus quoted thes

In 1758 a young, dissolute Prussian named Johann Georg Hamann found himself in a deep despair, wandering lost in the world, searching intensely for the “Light of life.” He found it—or, rather, it found him—in the wonder of the Word made flesh. After his conve

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus papam: We have a pope! And so Pope Francis walked out on the balcony, spoke humbly of his mission, asked for the prayers of all people, and blessed the city and the world. It was a climactic moment, coming after weeks

Pushed on the matter I guess I would confess to being something of a universalist. If it was God’s purpose to reconcile the world through Christ, I’ve never felt comfortable saying God can’t have what he wants. There has always been a strain of Christian t