SlutCon’s Emotional Void
The tech-rationalist phenomenon “SlutCon” caused quite a stir online, perhaps predictably. SlutCon was a multi-day retreat and series of workshops, held in the East Bay in late September and…
October 2026
Print Edition
October 2026 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
The Left Is Right About the Bible
Creedal Orthodoxy Won’t Save Us
Pundits tell us that we are moving beyond the culture wars. Left and right are merging in…
Friendly Neighborhood Philosopher
Every now and then, a work of art comes along that helps us think through the thicket…
Talkin’ God and Football
Paul Finebaum is known as “the mouth of the South,” but he does a lot of listening.…
The Scandal of Jewish Belief
The Gospel of Matthew ends with this promise of Jesus to his disciples: “Behold, I am with…
Icarus Descending
SlutCon’s Emotional Void
The tech-rationalist phenomenon “SlutCon” caused quite a stir online, perhaps predictably. SlutCon was a multi-day retreat and…
Romancing the Machine
A friend of mine asked a researcher at Anthropic whether Claude was conscious. He replied, “Are you…
Serial Liar, Serial Comma
How would you write a public letter that you know will become front-page news? Would you write…
Who Killed the Clancy Children?
After a Massachusetts jury failed to convict Lindsay Clancy of strangling her three small children to death…
Seven Years Alone on Wildcat Mountain
I didn’t like doing my spring cleaning in March. March is cold on Wildcat Mountain. It was…
Living Humanae Vitae in Poland
Humanae Vitae remains alive, if not entirely well, fifty-eight years after its promulgation. When Pope Paul VI…
The Making of Roger Scruton
Cambridge, October 1964. A new undergraduate named Mary Hoffman is sitting in the corner at a party,…
How Not to Defend Reading
Has Elon Musk read the Odyssey? Despite the trillionaire’s endless carping about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of…
The Protestant Missions History Forgot
The World’s Reformation is a splendid achievement. Extensively researched, Alec Ryrie’s book covers an extraordinary global scope,…
The “Right to Die” Will Be The Death of Solidarity
Imagine that you work as a janitor in the office building of a large corporation. One evening…
Lethe
He thought he saw her in the orchid house / and all the flowers seemed to disappear…
On Suddenly Having Several Children
“God never gives us more than we can take,” / the midwife told us, after catching…
Centaur
The Etruscan centaur holds up his right hand, / not palm outward as if to stop chariot…
Iraq and the Moral Judgement
Some readers have complained that First Things, and I in particular, have had a great deal to…
Just War and Iraq Wars
The first phase of the Iraq Wars came to a dramatic—and ominously prophetic—denouement on that heady day…
The Good Samaritan’s Burden
In his interestingly wrong-headed essay, Paul Miller argues that there are extraterritorial evils so great that they…
The Theology of Foreign Policy
On matters of foreign policy, Americans are divided into two hidden camps. Not Republicans versus Democrats, nor…
America’s Fighting Faith
The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interestby walter a. mcdougallyale,…
Small Wars, Big Plans
Less than a year after the attack of September 11, Americans have just about succeeded in absorbing…
