Event Calendar

First Things is hosting our Spring 2022 Intellectual Retreat on Freedom in Phoenix. We hope to see you there!

We are pleased to invite you to the 2022 First Things Lecture in Washington, D.C., featuring Josh Mitchell. 

Now in its 34th year, the Erasmus Lecture brings world-renowned speakers to New York—including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Gilbert Meilaender, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks—to address an audience of over five hundred people each year. The lecture also appears in the pages of First Things and on FirstThings.com.

First Things is pleased to host its 6th Annual Poetry Reading with Paul Mariani.

For readers in the New York City area, there will be a free screening of the new documentary, Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender?, at our offices at 9 East 40th Street on the tenth floor, on Tuesday, September 28th at 7:00pm. 

First Things presents our 2021—2022 reading group, which will discuss the nature of love and its various forms as they appear in classical works throughout the centuries. Among the topics discussed will be love’s role in life, differences between pagan and Christian understandings of love, and the harmony or opposition between desiring love (eros) and charity (agape). The reading group will meet monthly on a Thursday starting September 16, 2021, and ending May 19, 2022. The Group will be divided into a morning and evening session, and each session will complete the same readings.  

First Things is hosting our 2021 Intellectual Retreat on Solidarity in New York City. We hope to see you there!

Now in its 33rd year, the 2020 Erasmus Lecture will be presented by Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik. This year's lecture will be live-streamed. 

R. R. Reno hosts Carter Snead for a discussion of his recent book, What It Means To Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics.

First Things presents our 2020–2021 reading group to discuss works by Josef Pieper that focus on the themes of leisure, contemplation, festivity, and happiness. In a profound synthesis of these concepts, developed in several works, Pieper argues that the ultimate meaning of human life lies in contemplative activity, which finds its highest expression in festivity. Pieper describes the necessary prerequisites for such activity: an understanding of the world as created and an inner quiet that allows one to see reality and be “in tune with the world.”