Archive

Out in some wild place, there stands a prophet. He is alone with the elements and his God. He has retreated from the crowds, yet again and again they follow him and demand a sign...

The Armagnac was low in the bottle when my host erupted on the subject of American empire. “We have farm boys from Iowa in every damned desert on earth! We have

As the People of God, the Church is the temple of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s very body (1 Cor. 12:27). Our Lord superintends our prayers, teaching, and leadership. He...

In a final scene of ­Dorothy Sayers’s 1930 novel Strong ­Poison, a murderer devours a large quantity of Turkish delight in the parlor of Lord ­Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur-­sleuth...

The wind has shifted. People want hard religion, not easy religion. They seek out communities that are demanding rather than permissive. They want truth-based ­theologies, not outlooks softened with...

I doubt the readers of First Things need persuading that pornography is bad. It might feel invigorating to revisit this moral, cultural...

It is often said that the end of Latin as the Church’s liturgical language was the most obvious change to Catholic life brought by the Second Vatican Council. There is truth to this, despite the fact...

For Emily Ballou, it seemed like the perfect solution. She had always wanted to adopt a child someday—she had been an adoptee herself—but the complications and expenses of traditional...

A battle has broken out on the American right. Two visions of what it means to have children are contending for supremacy. On one side stands the genetic-determinist right, which...

Imagine a world without Protestantism. I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups...

Zero visibility possible,you read aloud. The logic’s water-tight:there’s always a good chance for lack of sight.  We left late. This valley’s crossableon good days, but today, the signs are...

The living soul will demand life, the living soul won’t listen to mechanics, the living soul is suspicious, the living soul is retrograde! —Dostoevsky’s Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment ...

Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term covering ­many beliefs about the powers possessed by computers, both now and in the future. Because computers today perform many tasks formerly reserved...

Several months ago, I came ­into possession of an extraordinary book—a hardcover copy of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and ­Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern...

Super Bowl ads are a great American art form. Paying eight million dollars or more for a chance to capture the collective national imagination in thirty seconds isn’t merely...