Agonistic End Times
In Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot notes, “The end is where we start from.” Our sense of when and how things reach their final consummation influences our views of…
December 2025
Print Edition
December 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
False Patriots
The Common Sense of John Searle
The twentieth-century philosopher Wilfrid Sellars drew an influential distinction between “the manifest image,” which is the way…
Canterbury Fails
When it was announced in October that the next archbishop of Canterbury would be a woman with…
Taming the Tongue
On October 14, Politico reported on a group chat in which leaders of various Young Republicans groups…
Kings, Behold and Wail
I was a full-time parish priest at a time when we still visited people in their homes.…
The First Things Podcast
Heritage and the Right
Conversations
The Church’s Answer to the World (ft. Carter Griffin)
The Editor’s Desk
Is the UK a Nation of Immigrants? (ft. Louise Perry)
The Surrogacy Exploitation Crisis
Hallowed Be Thy Names
Is confusion surrounding a doctrine sufficient reason to suppress it? The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the…
A Catholic Approach to Immigration
In the USCCB’s recent Special Pastoral Message, the bishops of the United States highlight the suffering inflicted…
The Grammar of Reverence
Something is stirring in the West. After decades of polite secular confidence, people are talking about God…
Beyond the Immigration Headlines
If you are a regular reader, you will have noticed that the interval between the previous column…
Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage
People can get used to most anything. Even the abyss may be rendered tolerable—or, for that matter,…
The Death of Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman was a Nobel laureate in economics, the author of the international bestseller Thinking, Fast and…
Christian Ownership Maximalism
Christendom is gone. So, too, is much of the Western civilization that was built atop it. Christians…
Fossilized Faith
Christian Smith, a sociologist at Notre Dame, has a knack for turning academic research into books that…
Briefly Noted
The Book of Mormon simultaneously affirms the Bible and challenges its uniqueness, with the stated purpose to…
The Rest as History
The Sabbath is making a comeback. Across the West, that most singular and ancient of weekly phenomena—a…
Petrarch: Rime Sparse 81
I am so wearied by the ancient weight Of my own sins, by my bad habits’ load…
Strange Gods
We promised Joshua that we would serve the god who brought us to this land. Of course…
On an Iced Handrail
Sunlight coruscates the ice and glitters, turning the chipped, green handrail to a ray of emerald only…
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 Christians…
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.…
