We did a bit of research for you, and came up with an intellectual feast from our leading theologians, philosophers, and public intellectuals—all from the pages of First Things.

And this is really just a taste—we’ve been talking about these issues for the last twenty-six years.

To join the conversation as it continues, check out our student subscription rates here.


Marriage & Family

How I Evolved on Gay Marriage by Matthew Schmitz

“It was a time when everyone was supposed to evolve—and I did, just not in the way I was supposed to. Coming around to approving gay unions as marriages never became a possibility for me.”

The Meanings of Marriage by John Witte Jr.

“Marriage is at once a harbor of the self and a harbinger of the community, a symbol of divine love and a structure of reasoned consent, an enduring ancient mystery and a constantly modern invention. ”

Marriage in Counterpoint and Harmony by Gilbert Meilander

“Marriage is, therefore, a sphere of life in which we must struggle to enact our faithfulness. Here we learn what a price permanent, faithful commitment to just one person who is completely other than ourself may exact.”

The Wreckage of Obergefell by Michael Stokes Paulsen

“Every generation, it seems, has its paradigm-defining Supreme Court case: a decision (or series of decisions) that determines the jurisprudential ethos and frames the judicial, political, and academic debate for the next quarter century or so.”

Sexuality

Against Heterosexuality by Michael W. Hannon

“Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations.”

Sex and the Religion of Me by James Kalb

“The new orthodoxy on homosexuality is about more than sex. It is an outcome of a profound change in traditional understandings of the world, the abolition of natural meanings and essences in favor of will and technique.”

Is Sex Necessary? by Roger Scruton

“The result of the sexual revolution is with us for all to see, and it is far more alarming and far more devastating for the next generation than anything predicted by Thurber and White. We have been liberated from the old morality; but a puritanical anti-morality has come in its place.”

Same-Sex Science by Stanton L. Jones

“As religious believers, we must confess our own culpability in creating the mess we are in.”

Transgender Delusion by Richard Corradi

“The medieval field of alchemy—the attempt to change base metals into gold and to find the philosopher’s stone capable of bringing about human perfection, even immortality—is ludicrous to the modern mind, a relic of a prescientific time. Yet the ancient belief in transmutation is still with us.”

Surgical Sex by Paul McHugh

Why we stopped doing sex-change surgeries.

Men, Women & Manners

Feminism: Beyond the Second Stage by Jessica Gress-Wright

“We need to have a women’s movement with ideals, a movement that fights to give women the choice to recreate the irrational love and uneconomic nurturing that family implies. We need a women’s movement that supports child benefits and family benefits, not child-care lobby benefits or industry benefits.”

Amnesty International Betrays Women by Darren Geist

“Amnesty claims that it is advancing the “human rights of sex workers” and the freedom of women to control their bodies. But this proposal is not just about the right to sell sex. It is also about the right of men to buy sex.”

Men and Women—Can We Be Friends? by Gilbert Meilaender

Well, can we?

The World’s Oldest Virtue by Judith Martin

“But I would contend that obeisance to etiquette, far from being a weak and optional virtue, much less a sin, is the oldest social virtue, and an indispensable partner of morality. Rather than being the crowning touch of good behavior in the upper reaches of a stratified society, etiquette is civilization’s first necessity.”

Jane Austen, Public Theologian by Peter J. Leithart

“Austen sensed the corrosive effects of individualism, and her uncanny intelligence and attention to the details of social surface enabled her to give us one of literature’s sharpest portraits of this emerging reality. That she also recognized the absence and failure of the Church in combating this decay makes her a public theologian to reckon with.”

Porn, Hooking Up & Other Evils

Sex and Danger at UVA by Vigen Guroian

“Our unisex colleges and universities have abolished the spaces that supported habits of courtship. What remains, what they have gone about creating, are spaces that invite and accommodate hook-ups and casual cohabitation—and open opportunities for forms of sexual violence that were not likely to happen on campus grounds in the past.”

Sex in the Meritocracy by Helen Andrews

“Take a look at the Sex Week schedule of events (if you have a strong stomach) and you will see just how much of the itinerary is devoted to instruction—how to give the best this, get the most that, and generally become as accomplished at sex as you are at everything else.”

Pornography and Acedia by Reinhard Hütter

“Acedia creates a void that we try to fill with transient rushes of pleasure—primarily venereal pleasure—to ward off the ennui of life bereft of its very center. But the simulacra that promise the rushes of pleasure we seek betray us.”

Not Your Father’s Pornography by Jason Byassee

“We are so awash in pornography these days that most of us don’t recognize it anymore.”

Life Issues

The Women of Roe v. Wade by Mary Ann Glendon

“It’s something of a puzzle why the public has never really grasped how extreme the legal treatment of abortion is in the United States. (Even Sweden, the poster country for women’s equality and liberal attitudes toward human sexuality, strictly regulates abortion after the eighteenth week of pregnancy.)”

Abortion before Roe by Russell Hittinger

“Legal abortion came into existence much the same way as physician-assisted euthanasia is coming into existence today: via the federal judiciary in direct opposition to the will of the citizens in the states.”

Abortion: A Failure to Communicate by Paul F. Swope

“Recent research on the psychology of pro-choice women offers insight into why the pro-life movement has not been as effective as it might have been in persuading women to choose life; it also offers opportunities to improve dramatically the scope and influence of the pro-life message, particularly among women of childbearing age.”

The New Abortion Debate by Robert P. George and Ramesh Ponnuru

“The truth is that legal reform is required as a matter of both political justice and cultural transformation. The pro-life movement cannot possibly be strengthened by abandoning its core belief about the status of unborn human life.”

An Open Letter on Abortion by Marc F. Griesbach

“The mere fact of a woman’s choosing to have an abortion, of exercising her power of free choice, does not make her choice right—any more than if she freely chose to shoplift, or rob a bank, or kidnap another woman’s child. For to acknowledge that men and women have freedom of choice doesn’t settle, but only raises, the question of whether or not the specific acts we choose to perform are morally justifiable.”

Religious Freedom

Our Failed Religious Freedom Policy by Thomas F. Farr

“It is no accident that the first affirmation in our Bill of Rights is that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’”

In Defense of Religious Freedom a statement by Evangelicals and Catholics Together

“We are now concerned—indeed, deeply concerned—that religious freedom is under renewed assault around the world. While the threats to freedom of faith, religious practice, and religious participation in public affairs in Islamist and communist states are widely recognized, grave threats to religious freedom have also emerged in the developed democracies.”

The Truth about Religious Freedom by Michael Novak

“Secularism is a most unsure basis for democratic survival. The struggle of Islamic nations to move to democracy is placing considerable pressure upon our existing Western theories.”

Natural Law

In Defense of Natural Law by Phillip E. Johnson

“At one time the Catholic natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his followers dominated European thinking, but its metaphysical foundations were undermined as science replaced Aristotelian teleology and Catholic theology with a materialist worldview that considers only efficient causes. The project of Grisez-Finnis is to save natural law by reestablishing it on a secular foundation that does not appeal directly to those metaphysical claims that modern science rejects as outdated.”

Natural Law and a Nihilistic Culture by Carl F. Henry

“Natural Law affirms is that all human beings share a set of ethical norms and imperatives that they commonly perceive without dependence on supernatural disclosure and illumination. Humanity, in short, universally knows a body of morally binding laws that shape a common pattern of social behavior, and moreover knows these imperatives without reference to transcendent revelation.”

And so much more . . .