The Flawed System of Sexual Abuse Settlements
There was a window from the late 1980s through the early 2000s when the sex abuse of minors seemed to be a predominantly Catholic Church problem. At least in…
June/July 2025
Print Edition
June/July 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
How Obergefell Failed
Angels and Kingdoms
We are familiar with the “disenchantment” thesis about modern culture. When Max Weber suggested it in the…
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…
The First Things Podcast
L.A. and Elon
Conversations
The Fed and the College
The Editor’s Desk
The Quest for the Historical Jesus
Obergefell Must Go
The Flawed System of Sexual Abuse Settlements
There was a window from the late 1980s through the early 2000s when the sex abuse of…
Can Progressives Get Behind Parental Rights for All?
Imagine the following scenario: A Louisiana school district introduces a “family life” curriculum for public preschools and…
Apocalypse Now
I recently spoke to one of Germany’s largest booksellers. His success, including with dissident literature, is based…
Make Harvard Congregationalist Again
President Trump’s so-called One, Big, Beautiful Bill contains a slew of interesting provisions, one of which concerns…
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.…
