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

God as a Gentleman

Everybody knows the Decalogue and, in particular, the commandment “You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain” (Exod. 20:7). In spite of this warning, we too easily call God “Lord”—nay, we invoke him as “the Lord”—as if such a word were devoid of ambiguity and not badly . . . . Continue Reading »

God and Brexit

When biblical religion collapsed, as it manifestly has in most of Old Europe and too much of New Europe after 1989, commitments to subsidiarity and its respect for difference imploded as well. Continue Reading »

Making the Garden

It has taken me almost fifty years to understand fully that there is a necessary connection between God and architecture, and that this connection is, in part, empirically verifiable. Further, I have come to the view that the sacredness of the physical world—and the potential of the physical . . . . Continue Reading »

Authority, Given and Received

When Pontius Pilate warns Jesus that he has authority over life and death, Jesus reminds him, “you would have no authority over me, unless it had been given from above” (John 19:10–11). At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus assures his disciples that “all authority has been given to me in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Mystery of Eternal Love

One of the most common charges leveled against Christians in the early church was that they were atheists. They did not worship the gods of Rome and Greece, nor did they follow the mystery religions of the East. Indeed, they claimed to worship the one true God of Israel, the Creator of all that is, . . . . Continue Reading »

Forgetting God

Laudato Si, last week’s encyclical from Pope Francis, seeks to address a plethora of problems in the modern world—predominately focusing on environmental issues, distributive justice, and perceived problems with consensus developmental economic theory. Pope Francis offers a harsh critique of . . . . Continue Reading »

Filter Tag Articles