The Rise and Fall of English Exceptionalism
The English have always thought highly of themselves. St. Bede the Venerable heralded the evangelization of the Angles as the beginning of a very special relationship: “the goodness of…
Aug/Sept 2025
Print Edition
Aug/Sept 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
Paul’s Ethnic Gospel
The Substance of Our Lives
While I was in college, the local priest got me to come along with him on his…
War on the Weak and a Bad Bishop
A case study in brain-dead deconsolidation: marijuana legalization. Marijuana has been legal in New York State since…
The Right to Be Killed
In the days surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., leaders of the civil rights movement…
No Chosen, No “Almost Chosen”
Mazal tov! Partisans on the left and on the right, fighting bitterly for a larger swath of…
The First Things Podcast
At Home and Abroad
Conversations
The Real History of Black Progress (and Regress)
The Editor’s Desk
The Death of the Oxford Don
What We’ve Been Reading—Summer 2025
Winners of the Second Annual First Things Poetry Prize
We are pleased to announce the winners of the second annual First Things Poetry Prize. T. O.…
The Rise and Fall of English Exceptionalism
The English have always thought highly of themselves. St. Bede the Venerable heralded the evangelization of the…
Clapping Trees and Other Biological Wonders
Two books on plant evolution, both alternately nutty and brilliant, were recently published. The subtitle of Robert…
Erasing Christianity from American History
It is a historical fact that Christianity played a central role in the colonization of the New…
Engineers for the Gospel
About twenty years ago, a lecturer in philosophy stopped by my office in the Engineering Faculty. He…
Waugh Against the Fogeys
On June 17, 1953, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to a friend: “I am now preparing a…
The Future of Catholic Theology
About ten years ago I found myself in China teaching a weeklong philosophy seminar on the thought…
Ecumenical Fear and Loathing
Once upon a time, there was a culture that was split into two bitterly opposed parties. They…
Goodbye, Saffron
In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman wrote that the “people of the Middle…
Out of the Wilderness
When the agnostic Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch died, he asked that his funeral be conducted…
Forecast
How long can two people stay togetherwith this in the news and that in the sky? A…
Second Death
Between our physical demise—when the soul, like a savedpage from a trashed notebook, lifts in the handof…
Greetings on a Morning Walk
Blackberry vines, you hold this ground in the shade of a willow: all thorns, no fruit. *…
Empathy is Not Charity
Martin Scorsese’s recent film Silence, like the historical novel by Shūsaku Endō on which it is based,…
The Sacred Heart of Victor Hugo
The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables By Mario Vargas Llosa Princeton University Press,…
The Whole World Groans
St. Jerome, angry over the protracted Arian crisis and the apparent victory of the “semi-Arians” at the…
Christianity and Poetry
I When I became a man, I put away childish things. —St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13 Most…
My Madness
My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165,…
Shakespeare, Four Centuries On
This Saturday, April 23rd, marks an important anniversary: four hundred years since the death of William Shakespeare.…
