Julia Yost

Before #MeToo, before Black Lives Matter, Bessel van der Kolk argued for the centrality of trauma to human experience. President of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts, van der Kolk is author of The Body Keeps the Score, a book that has been a perennial best-seller since . . . . Continue Reading »

On the centennial of John Paul II's birth, it is worth praising the pope whose death got this cradle Catholic to leave the cradle. Continue Reading »

The High Court’s decision in Pell v. The Queen vindicates not so much Pell, whose guilt was always a dubious proposition, as Australian justice, which was on its way to disgracing itself. Continue Reading »

Harold Bloom, who died in October at age eighty-nine, was The Last Great American Literary Critic. The Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, he wrote best sellers, appeared on talk shows, and collected honorary doctorates like lint. Bloom championed the Western Canon against its critics, . . . . Continue Reading »

John Henry Newman joined the Catholic Church on October 9, 1845, after concluding that the via media of Anglo-Catholicism, which he had sought for years to vindicate, existed only in theory, a dream of dons. He had constructed a “paper religion”; his notion of the Church of England . . . . Continue Reading »

Obituaries for Toni Morrison, who died on August 5, remember her as a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, a black woman novelist, and the last great American novelist—never a Catholic novelist. Morrison converted to Catholicism at age twelve but stood aloof from the Church for years. Despite a few . . . . Continue Reading »

Our concern for justice should lead us to protest when men like George Cardinal Pell are falsely convicted.  Continue Reading »

Regretting Motherhood:  A Study by orna donath north atlantic, 272 pages, $15.95 In March, a self-help author tweeted that whereas he once intended to have many children, now, after putting in a few years on his first, he had decided that one was enough, and more than enough, and if he had it . . . . Continue Reading »

An excerpt from the book Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals on the Path to Rome.  Continue Reading »

First Things has no stable of staff writers, nor are we underwritten by billionaire benefactors and ad revenue from Fortune 500 corporations. Continue Reading »