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Articles
Thanksgiving Linguistics
As we pause to give thanks for family, turkey, and Plymouth in the year 1621, take a few moments to give thought as well to the very word “thanksgiving,”...
Pure Episcopalianism
It was in June 2022 that my wife and I started looking for a home in Washington, D.C. Among our desires was a safe neighborhood in which to raise...
October 7 and the World’s Narrative
For decades, people spoke of knowing exactly where they were when they learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Later generations have reflected in much the same way on...
To Catch a Plagiarist
The plagiarism wars have begun. Claudine Gay is out as president of Harvard, in large part because of conduct that the Harvard Corporation and Gay herself refuse to describe...
Athens, Jerusalem, and Manhattan
What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Or the Academy with the Church? Or heretics with Christians?” These questions, posed in his On the Prescription of Heretics, are...
Primordial Elements
This article is part of our 2023 year-end campaign series, featuring reflections from prominent authors on why First Things matters. To make your year-end campaign gift now, visit firstthings.com/donate. When...
Mark’s Poem of the Passion and My Late Friend Dave
On October 20, 2023, the Reverend David Keith Louder, a Lutheran pastor, died at the age of fifty-six in Windber, a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania. He had suffered...
A Benediction for Mimi
A couple of hours after my wife’s ninety-eight-year-old grandmother had a stroke earlier this month, the family gathered by her bedside in the house she’d lived in for a...
Jew-ish
In 1969, the year I was born, Joshua cracked the top 200 names for American boys for the first time since records began to be kept in 1880: #197....
In Good Company
One year ago, Princeton University fired me. This was one of the worst things ever to happen to me, but also one of the best. It’s sad to watch...
Grace and Serendipity
When you’re a linguist, you get used to being asked how many languages you speak. But a few years ago I was asked for the first time, by a...
Finding Refuge at the University of Dallas
How often do you have brunch with your students?” An undergraduate at the University of Dallas asked me this, cheerfully and innocently, on a recent Saturday morning. I was...
My Confessions
A few years ago, in the middle of the journey of life—in modern terms, having a midlife crisis—I read St. Augustine’s Confessions for the first time since I was eighteen....
