Obergefell Must Go
Last week marked ten years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges—the case that invalidated state laws defining marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife…
June/July 2025
Print Edition
June/July 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
How Obergefell Failed
Classical Renewal by Research
The research pursued these days in university humanities departments does not, as a rule, enjoy high esteem…
The Minecraft Effect
Jews, the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik observed, were given the Torah at Sinai not as mere…
An Evangelical in Italy
How does an evangelical—not joined with the Church in Rome, but committed to one holy, catholic, and…
Leave Joy Alone
C S. Lewis has never been my favorite Christian writer. I admit this sheepishly, given his stature.…
The First Things Podcast
L.A. and Elon
Conversations
The Fed and the College
The Editor’s Desk
The Quest for the Historical Jesus
New York Deserves Better than State-Sanctioned Suicide
The U.K.’s Abortion Reckoning
The U.K. has pushed too far on abortion. On June 17, an amendment to decriminalize abortion for…
Obergefell Must Go
Last week marked ten years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges—the case that invalidated…
Why the Catholic Church’s Voice on AI Could Be the Most Consequential
Recently, Pope Leo XIV delivered a personal message to Silicon Valley executives, academics, and Vatican officials gathered…
Suicide Prevention Must Be for Everyone
New York’s governor Kathy Hochul has placed a much-needed focus on suicide prevention. If she wishes to…
The Future of Reading
More is read now in a year than was read before in a hundred years.” So declared…
Is America a Creedal Nation?
All civilizations, like all individuals, have flaws. The Christian civilization of Church and empire had flaws. America,…
Saving Christian Europe
Christianity made Europe,” Georges Bernanos writes in The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon. “Christianity is dead. Europe…
Jesus After the Critics
Quests for the “historical Jesus” are as old as Christianity itself. The claims of Jesus’s earliest followers…
Creating U.S. Catholicism
In 1928, Undersecretary of State William R. Castle Jr. wrote about “by far the most important Roman…
Why Twain Endures
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Sam Clemens (not yet “Mark Twain”) didn’t know where…
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…
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.…
