A Catholic Fix for American Higher Education?
Why are so many American colleges and universities in crisis? Drew Gilpin Faust, an accomplished Civil War historian, gave the answer, perhaps unwittingly, at her 2007 inauguration as the…
June/July 2025
Print Edition
June/July 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
How I Kicked My Phone Habit
Leave Joy Alone
C S. Lewis has never been my favorite Christian writer. I admit this sheepishly, given his stature.…
An Evangelical in Italy
How does an evangelical—not joined with the Church in Rome, but committed to one holy, catholic, and…
Classical Renewal by Research
The research pursued these days in university humanities departments does not, as a rule, enjoy high esteem…
How Obergefell Failed
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, announcing a…
The First Things Podcast
The Hour for a New Humanism | 2025 D.C. Lecture
Conversations
Sainthood through Marriage
The Editor’s Desk
Women Without Men!
New York Deserves Better than State-Sanctioned Suicide
A Catholic Fix for American Higher Education?
Why are so many American colleges and universities in crisis? Drew Gilpin Faust, an accomplished Civil War…
Pope Leo XIII and Emperor Wilhelm II
The inauguration of the new pope, held on the 105th birthday of St. John Paul II, was…
The Fall of a Sparrow
For many years now, I have made my summer office on the secluded patio of a Calgary…
Recognizing the Importance of MacIntyre
The death of Alasdair MacIntyre at the age of ninety-six is neither unexpected nor tragic. His close…
How to Commemorate 1776
Next year is America’s 250th anniversary, and President Trump has promised us a “spectacular birthday party.” The…
Why Homeschool?
My father used to quiz us at the kitchen table, my older brother and me, during dinner.…
Francis in Full
By common consensus, Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio won the papacy by means of an intervention he made…
Defending the Christian Character of England
A couple of years ago, I heard the historian David Starkey describe the Church of England as…
Liberal Integralists
Eight years ago, Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State was described in these pages as “the…
Jesus After the Critics
Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesusby elaine pagelsdoubleday, 336 pages, $30 Quests for the “historical Jesus”…
Greetings on a Morning Walk
Blackberry vines, you hold this ground in the shade of a willow: all thorns, no fruit. *…
An Outline of Trees
They rise above us, arching, spreading, thin Where trunk and bough give way to veining twig. We…
Fallacy
A shadow cast by something invisible falls on the white cover of a book lying on my…
Converting Beauty into Prayer
A few weeks ago, I went to an Easter concert put on by a new nonprofit called…
A Leonine Revival
We are still in the early days of the pontificate of Leo XIV. No one who prognosticates…
Is America a Creedal Nation?
All civilizations, like all individuals, have flaws. The Christian civilization of Church and empire had flaws. America,…
Ringing Out Hope in Nagasaki
The riddle of Japanese Catholicism has long fascinated me. At the end of World War II, Catholics…
Public Schools and the Moral Neutrality Myth
On April 22, Kelly Armstrong, the Republican governor of North Dakota, vetoed a bill passed by the…
Are the Tech Bros Worse than Queer Theorists?
Last week, two signs of our times passed across my desk. First, a colleague drew my attention…
