Archive


More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.

Articles

Filter

Articles

Same-Sex Marriage and the European Bishops

John M. Grondelski

On November 25, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Poland to recognize same-sex marriage. Polish law does not provide for same-sex marriage, and Polandโ€™s constitution explicitly declares the...

Just Stop It

Liel Leibovitz

Earlier this summer, Egyptโ€™s Ministry of Religious Endowments launched a new campaign. It is entitled โ€œCorrect Your Concepts,โ€ and you need exert little effort to figure out which perceptions...

Canticle of All Creatures

Dana Gioia

This poem was written by St. Francis of Assisi, and translated by Dana Gioia. Most high, all powerful, and most good Lord,Yours are the praises, glory, honor, blessings.Only to...

Work Is for the Worker

Ricky McRoskey

In these early days of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV has made one thing clear: The responsible use of AI will be one of his central themes. It has...

Tucker and the Right

Glenn C. Loury

Something like a civil war is unfolding within the American conservative movement. It is not merely a dispute about policy agendas, foreign alliances, or the boundaries of political discourse....

Goddity

Ephraim Radner

The Nativity of our Lordโ€”born an infant, laid in a manger. Itโ€™s an utterly strange story: The Creator of all things takes the flesh of and lives as a...

The Ruin

A. M. Juster

Remorseless sun ย  ย  stunts the dew Glistening towers ย  ย  of tainted glassignite and blister ย  ย  in blood-yellow lightrecalling the tallest ย  ย  of crumbling tombsas humbler...

Letters

As a Protestant, I began ยญValerie Stiversโ€™s โ€œHow I Learned to Love Confessionโ€ (November 2025) mentally recalling the catechetical rebuttals . . .

Caravaggio and Us

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

Nicolas Poussin, the greatest French artist of the seventeenth century, once said that Caravaggio had come into the world to destroy painting. ยญPoussinโ€™s concept of beauty led him to...

What Does โ€œPostliberalismโ€ Mean?

R. R. Reno

Many regard โ€œpostliberalismโ€ as a political program. In 1993, when the tide of globalized liberalism was at its highwater mark, the contrarian John Gray published Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political...

The Problem with the Evangelical Elite

Aaron M. Renn

The problem with the evangelical elite is that there isnโ€™t one. All too few evangelical Christians hold senior positions in the ยญculture-shapยญing domains of American ยญsociety. Evangelicals donโ€™t run...

Practitioners of Infanticide

Alexander Raikin

A physician declares his dying patientโ€”a seven-pound baby boyโ€”โ€œdangerous as dynamite,โ€ a โ€œmenace to society.โ€ A routine medical procedure could save the boyโ€™s life, but he was born deformed....

The Lessons of Woodrow Wilson

R. R. Reno

In his excellent book about our troubled times, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of Americaโ€™s Political Crisis, James Davison Hunter notes that enduring solidarity rests on common...

In Praise of Translation

Erik Varden

This essay was delivered as the 38th Annual Erasmus Lecture. The circumstances of my life have been such that I have moved, since adolescence, in a ยญborderland between languages....

Address Bookย 

Paul Willis

The leather binding, torn and askew,is barely joined by brittle pieces of Scotch tape. ย And the names and streets, long since fledย to a digital cloud of witnesses,ย are more like...