Why We Hunger for Beauty

by Francis X. Maier

Beauty is an affirmation of our shared human dignity. It reminds us of life’s goodness in an age of transgressive narcissism and repudiation of the past. Continue Reading »

2 May 2022

The Burdensome Myth of Romantic Love

by David C. Dollahite and Betsy VanDenBerghe

As people abandon religious institutions, they start expecting romantic relationships to satisfy their yearnings for transcendence. Continue Reading »

14 Feb 2018

Denying Transcendence

by Connor Grubaugh

First Things proclaims self-denial to a navel-gazing generation. Continue Reading »

21 Jun 2017

After the Fall

by Michael Hanby

If there is hope to be found in this painful political year, it is in the fact that the spell which liberal modernity has long cast over the Christian imagination might finally be starting to dissolve even as technocracy tightens its grip on our everyday lives. Continue Reading »

20 Oct 2016

A Secular Political Philosophy (ii)

by Ralph Hancock

(continued from 6/1/09) As little inclined as is Charles Taylor to connect the pre-ontological with the metaphysical, religious “experience” with cognitive assertions, he cannot finally avoid making certain claims about the way things are, or at least the way human things are: We all see . . . . Continue Reading »

13 Jun 2009

The Transcendent in the Mundane

by Jill P. Baumgaertner

Ordinary Time by a. g. mojtabai doubleday, 223 pages, $17.95 A.G. Mojtabai’s nonfiction work, Blessed Assurance, won the 1986 Lillian Smith Award for the best book about the American South. Now, in her fifth novel, Ordinary Time, in prose as clean and spare as the landscape which is its setting, . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jun 1990