The Ones Who Didn’t Convert
Melanie McDonagh’s Converts, reviewed in First Things last month, allows us to gaze close-up at the extraordinary procession of eminent literary, artistic, and intellectual figures that made its way…
February 2026
Print Edition
February 2026 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
The Failure of Bioethics
A Tale of Two Maybes
Who knows, God may yet repent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we perish not”…
Mark Twain’s Religion
In 2014, when Kevin Malone’s opera Mysterious 44 premiered in Manchester, England, the production featured narrative voiceovers…
On the Pleasure of Admiring
The great essayist William Hazlitt observed that there is pleasure in hating. “Without something to hate,”…
AI as Liberation
You can learn everything you need to know about our collective state of mind from the fact…
Is Church-Hopping a Real Problem?
The Ones Who Didn’t Convert
Melanie McDonagh’s Converts, reviewed in First Things last month, allows us to gaze close-up at the extraordinary…
Goodbye, Childless Elites
The U.S. birthrate has declined to record lows in recent years, well below population replacement rates. So…
Restoring Venezuela Will Require Faith
The United States is leading the political transition in Venezuela, marking an end to the socialist regime…
Bladee’s Redemptive Rap
Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, better known by his pen name Novalis, died at the age of…
Cancer and the Cure of Souls
“I have cancer,” the elderly woman announced from her hospital bed high above York Avenue in Manhattan.…
In the Footsteps of Aeneas
Gian Lorenzo Bernini had only just turned twenty when he finished his sculpture of Aeneas, the mythical…
The Rise and Fall of Gay Activism
The Pride flag is progressive America’s banner. Before it was unfurled, most gays stayed in the closet.…
The Theology of Roe
A controversial abortion case reaches the Supreme Court, and men in black robes impose their religious views…
Stevenson’s Treasure
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head of a select company of writers renowned in their…
Can Liberals Be Pronatalists?
Last year the United Nations Population Division predicted that global population will peak in approximately sixty years,…
The Wallet
Oxblood, bifold, kept In a back bedroom Closet all these years, It dates to my time Of…
Another Madonna
Many may not notice the young rabbit, caughtin the thicket of brush near the bottom left-hand corner,…
Birdwatching
The people I want most to like all do it. I listen to their talk of swifts and…
Empathy is Not Charity
Martin Scorsese’s recent film Silence, like the historical novel by Shūsaku Endō on which it is based,…
The Sacred Heart of Victor Hugo
The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables By Mario Vargas Llosa Princeton University Press,…
The Whole World Groans
St. Jerome, angry over the protracted Arian crisis and the apparent victory of the “semi-Arians” at the…
Christianity and Poetry
I When I became a man, I put away childish things.—St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13 Most Christians…
My Madness
My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165,…
Shakespeare, Four Centuries On
This Saturday, April 23rd, marks an important anniversary: four hundred years since the death of William Shakespeare.…
