How to Commemorate 1776
Next year is America’s 250th anniversary, and President Trump has promised us a “spectacular birthday party.” The Semiquincentennial Commission is considering a number of grand plans: a “Great American…
June/July 2025
Print Edition
June/July 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
America’s New Grand Strategy
How I Kicked My Phone Habit
About eighteen months ago, I decided I wanted a healthier relationship with my smartphone. My phone had…
An Evangelical in Italy
How does an evangelical—not joined with the Church in Rome, but committed to one holy, catholic, and…
Classical Renewal by Research
The research pursued these days in university humanities departments does not, as a rule, enjoy high esteem…
How Obergefell Failed
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, announcing a…
The First Things Podcast
Pius vs. Innocent
Conversations
Law on Film
The Editor’s Desk
Women Without Men!
New York Deserves Better than State-Sanctioned Suicide
The Two Leos
Pope Leo XIV has explained that his choice of regnal name is an homage to Pope Leo…
David Tracy’s Theological Missteps
The Catholic Church in the United States has lost a great theologian with the recent death of…
Hopes for a New Pontificate
Within a few hours of the election of Pope Leo XIV and his masterful presentation of himself…
Friedrich Merz’s Fragile Victory
Friedrich Merz, the new German chancellor, is the first head of government in the federal republic to…
How to Commemorate 1776
Next year is America’s 250th anniversary, and President Trump has promised us a “spectacular birthday party.” The…
Why Homeschool?
My father used to quiz us at the kitchen table, my older brother and me, during dinner.…
Francis in Full
By common consensus, Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio won the papacy by means of an intervention he made…
Liberal Integralists
Eight years ago, Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State was described in these pages as “the…
Jesus After the Critics
Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesusby elaine pagelsdoubleday, 336 pages, $30 Quests for the “historical Jesus”…
Why Twain Endures
Mark Twainby ron chernowpenguin, 1,200 pages, $45 When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Sam Clemens…
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…
Jurassic Lark
How Fast Did T. rex Run?: Unsolved Questions from the Frontiers of Dinosaur Science by david hone…
Fighting the Noonday Devil
For most of the modern era, Christian apologists have emphasized the role of pride as the primary…
Jesus the Muslim Hippie
Many Christians and other non-Muslims who want to understand the Christ of Islam turn to the Qur’an,…
The Cross and the Machine
“Europeans didn’t only disinherit Aztecs and Incas. Continuously, since the sixteenth century, we have been disinheriting ourselves.”—John…
My Madness
My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165,…
Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button
All politics is local, as they say. And so, before we proceed to the big question of…
