Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
Articles 8
Generation Z: Desperate for Rules
I recently attended a meeting that many would consider anachronistic: Standards Night, an annual gathering for Mormon youth and their parents encouraging chaste and porn-free living. Some call this...
Suzuki Method Uberparenting
My oldest child started piano lessons back in the nineties, due to somewhat base parental motives. A friend who volunteered in prisons had told me that a common denominator...
Unsolicited Advice On How To Find A Mate
In one of his lesser known comedies, playwright Neil Simon depicts the irrationality of undiluted physical attraction through the love-struck yearnings of Norman. A โ60s radical, second in his...
โKnot Yetโ: Marriage and Other Choices
In the final scene of A&Eโs Pride and Prejudice the camera pans a double wedding tableau: Elizabeth and Darcy and Jane and Bingley, both couples surrounded by family and...
Evangelicals vs. Mormons: Blessed Are the Peacemakers
We refer to it in our family as โthe clown episode.โ Over a dozen years ago our family visited a collection of rare Bibles open to the public as...
The Unacceptable Alternative Lifestyle
They occasionally populate New Yorker storiesโcharacters on the peripheries of the narratorโs life, somehow only half human, almost surreal, because theyโre single, celibate, and plan to stay that way...
Cohabitation, Marriage, and Brangelina
While single and working in the Boston area during the 1980s, I observed the cohabitation phenomenon up close. My friends moved in with guys anticipating stability along with the...
Why Bigger Might Be Easier
In the National Marriage Projectโs exhaustive 2011 โState of Our Unionsโ report, a sidebar among the analyses and graphs draws attention to a subset social scientists tend to ignore...