Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

Self-Abuse

From the January 2024 Print Edition

The Catholic way is to include, and then sift: wise words from a wise priest that I remembered a few years back when I was reading, in this journal, an article withering in its condemnation of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the British court decision that opened the way . . . . Continue Reading »

Satan Unbound

From the December 2022 Print Edition

On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in 2021, after ­churches had reopened but while many pandemic restrictions remained in place, three priests in my parish celebrated a traditional rite called the Blessing of Water on the Vigil of Epiphany. The rite is similar to rituals in the churches of the . . . . Continue Reading »

On the Threshold: Part III

From the May 2022 Print Edition

Now it was Lent, and we were just forty days from Easter. Heavy rains and rising temperatures washed the snow away, and on Ash Wednesday, when I drove to the church, the sky was crowded with clouds seemingly blowing on different winds—heavy cumulus clouds, and behind and between them lighter . . . . Continue Reading »

On the Threshold: Part II

From the March 2022 Print Edition

It was at this point, at the very end of the Church year, inspired by a tremulous confidence and the irresistible attraction of first love, that I established the habit of going to daily Mass. Every day at noon when the bells of St. Mary’s were ringing out the Angelus over New Haven, I drove into . . . . Continue Reading »

On The Threshold

From the December 2021 Print Edition

“I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry. . . I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place . . . . Continue Reading »

Literature of the Word

From the October 2021 Print Edition

I have always been somewhat bemused by the perennial popularity of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth—century novel about four New England sisters coming of age. At least once a decade a new film or television adaptation appears, and the list of successful women writers who . . . . Continue Reading »

Going Further

From the October 2020 Print Edition

A year ago, with my two small granddaughters in tow, I visited a friend in an assisted living facility. Before her stroke, Terri was a daily communicant in my Catholic parish. Now she watches Mass on television. As she listed for my granddaughters the different programs she enjoys—Masses on . . . . Continue Reading »

Hawthorne’s Daughter

From the January 2020 Print Edition

In 1891, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of the novelist ­Nathaniel Hawthorne, was received into the Catholic Church. She was forty years old. Within a few years of her conversion she conceived a heroic ministry to destitute cancer patients at a time when cancer was believed to be contagious. She . . . . Continue Reading »

Grace, Continued

From the June/July 2019 Print Edition

Then, for three years, I traveled wherever Grace traveled. ­Wherever she went, I went, and after she prayed for my husband in Tarrytown, he wanted to go with me, for reasons I assumed were the same as mine. For three years her ministry was our church, and Ross came, too, and read some during the . . . . Continue Reading »