Archive

On the first day of a new month, I turn the pages of our calendars. To the left of the kitchen sink, for instance, on a small section perpendicular...

We know that our lives can change suddenly, “in the twinkling of an eye,” a truth that sets countless stories in motion, and yet when it actually happens to...

Several weeks ago, in sync with the start of Major League Baseball’s 2025 season, the University of Nebraska Press published David Krell’s 1978: Baseball and America in the Disco...

Readers of the April issue of First Things will have seen James F. Keating’s learned and perceptive review of James M. O’Toole’s excellent book For I Have Sinned: The...

Do you remember those illustrations (which used to be very common) that showed, say, a deliberately jokey “map” of what was in someone’s brain or “on their mind”? That...

Sometimes when I am starting a column, I look back to see what I wrote for this space roughly a year ago. I did so earlier this week, and...

Two years plus a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column that began thus: “I am and always have been a creature of routine.” And that was very...

If you have been following this column for a while, you know I love the very idea of “forthcoming books”; you may recall my account of learning, for the...

A year ago at this time, I devoted a column to “Hopes and Wishes for 2024”—mostly hopes, as it turned out, but with a handful of wishes. (I was...

A year ago, after a series of annual lists that grew longer and longer, I changed the format of this feature, making it much more manageable in size and...

In October of 2023, I wrote a column here about how I came to be doing jigsaw puzzles—every day!—with my wife, Wendy, something I could never have imagined. We...

If you have followed this column for a while, you will have gathered that there are a lot of books in our house. Even so, should you ever visit,...

October is almost gone (we’ve had a lovely fall season here in Wheaton), and it’s time—if you haven’t done so already—to start thinking about Christmas gifts. If you are...

In April of this year, I wrote about Nadya Williams’s Cultural Christians in the Early Church: A Historical and Practical Introduction to Christians in the Greco-Roman World, published near...

Late in October 2018, I wrote a First Things column called “A Sense of Time,” most of which was devoted to a then-new book by Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How...