Disappearance is usually felt as something bad. When things disappear, we sense the pull of death, the call of the dust, the loss of the palpable good. I have recently been moving house after many years in one place, with all its accumulations. Things, often intimate things, are left behind, given . . . . Continue Reading »
As has become distressingly clear, many people blame the Israelis for the atrocities that Hamas terrorists perpetrated on Saturday, October 7, against hundreds of civilians, including women and children, across southern Israel. The Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee, along with many . . . . Continue Reading »
Russell Kirk was haunted by the past. Ghosts prowled his house, peering through windows, moving furniture, startling guests. Far from resenting these presences, Kirk welcomed them. For he regarded society as “a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn.” He propounded this . . . . Continue Reading »
When Cormac McCarthy died in June at age eighty-nine, the news touched off grief and adulation such as contemporary literary authors rarely inspire. Musicians, scientists, conservatives, Catholics, all have claimed him. One man circulated and posted the notes he’d taken after a series of phone . . . . Continue Reading »
Readers would be hard-pressed to find a religious creed in the often dark works of Cormac McCarthy. But the writer's depictions of darkness are never devoid of light, however tragic or precarious its place in the narratives. Continue Reading »
What I care most about, along with many other fans, is whether The Rings of Power fits with the spirit of Tolkien’s legendarium. My answer, so far, is a tentative yes. Continue Reading »
Aldous Huxley was in certain respects a modern disenchanted intellectual, and he had no use for actual demons; but there are persons as serious and sane as he was who can state with authority that demons and demonic possession are real. Continue Reading »
Advent announces the coming of the Lord who breaks the arms of the sex traffickers, the drug lords, the arms dealers, and all their respectable collaborators. Continue Reading »
The idea of intrinsic evil may look harsh and punitive. But to those struggling to stay afloat, it can be a lifeline. Continue Reading »
In S. Y. Agnon’s 1939 novel A Guest for the Night, one of the protagonists, Daniel Bach, recounts his loss of faith. Throughout World War I, as a soldier in the trenches, he had been meticulous about donning his tefillin to recite his daily prayers. Until one morning, the tefillin . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
