He Died with a Microphone in His Hand
Why has the murder of Charlie Kirk resonated so powerfully through the culture? Is it because he was cut down so brutally in his prime? That he left behind…
October 2025
Print Edition
October 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
Paul’s Ethnic Gospel
The Substance of Our Lives
While I was in college, the local priest got me to come along with him on his…
War on the Weak and a Bad Bishop
A case study in brain-dead deconsolidation: marijuana legalization. Marijuana has been legal in New York State since…
The Right to Be Killed
In the days surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., leaders of the civil rights movement…
No Chosen, No “Almost Chosen”
Mazal tov! Partisans on the left and on the right, fighting bitterly for a larger swath of…
The First Things Podcast
Turning Point
Conversations
The Question of Suicide
The Editor’s Desk
Pius XII’s Vindication (ft. Michael Knowles)
Can Transsexuals Be Baptized?
No, DEI Does Not Mean God
According to Washington auxiliary bishop Roy Campbell, Catholics should stand up for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—DEI—because DEI…
He Died with a Microphone in His Hand
Why has the murder of Charlie Kirk resonated so powerfully through the culture? Is it because he…
Dare to Be a Dobson
Jerry Falwell. R. C. Sproul. John MacArthur. And now James Dobson. Over the last twenty years, death…
Still Life, Still Sacred
Renaissance painters would use life-sized wooden dolls called manichini to study how drapery folds on the human…
B. F. Skinner Is Back
In the summer of 1942, Arthur D. Hyde, vice president in charge of research at General Mills…
Finding Private Roy
By the late 1970s, when I attended public high school in rural, blue-collar Central New York, more…
Toward a New Humanism
The most pressing question we face today is that of the Psalmist: “What is man?” So urgent…
Hegel-Sized
A sense of an ending is in the air, but there’s little consensus about what’s ending or…
Bright Girdle Furled
Light on Darkness restores liturgy to its place at the heart of the medieval world. Like a…
Politics for Losers
In a 2002 essay, Christopher Caldwell—perhaps the premier conservative journalist intellectual writing today—paid a memorable compliment to…
Madonna and Child
First Place — 2025 First Things Poetry Prize
Not Versed in Country Things
Second Place — 2025 First Things Poetry Prize
For the Finders of Bodies in Murder Mysteries
Pray for her now, the cleaner arriving at dawn, unlocking, humming idly as she dusts till a…
Empathy is Not Charity
Martin Scorsese’s recent film Silence, like the historical novel by Shūsaku Endō on which it is based,…
The Sacred Heart of Victor Hugo
The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables By Mario Vargas Llosa Princeton University Press,…
The Whole World Groans
St. Jerome, angry over the protracted Arian crisis and the apparent victory of the “semi-Arians” at the…
Christianity and Poetry
I When I became a man, I put away childish things. —St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13 Most…
My Madness
My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165,…
Shakespeare, Four Centuries On
This Saturday, April 23rd, marks an important anniversary: four hundred years since the death of William Shakespeare.…
