Jason Arday and the Merciless Lie
The fall of Cambridge wunderkind Jason Arday was the British press story of the summer. To any perceptive onlooker, his tall tales of overcoming numerous impossible odds to scale…
Aug/Sept 2026
Print Edition
Aug/Sept 2026 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
Anti-Wokeness: An Obituary
Holding Things Together
So many streets around me are ugly. I do a lot of walking and jogging. I notice…
Ban the Books
Walk into a bookstore anywhere in the country. Chances are that, somewhere toward the front, you’ll see…
The Scandal of Jewish Belief
The Gospel of Matthew ends with this promise of Jesus to his disciples: “Behold, I am with…
The Sudden Death of the African Church
Total civilizational collapse is unusual. In the West, continuity exists between the Roman past and our contemporary…
Icarus Descending
Jason Arday and the Merciless Lie
The fall of Cambridge wunderkind Jason Arday was the British press story of the summer. To any…
Finding Ourselves in Faerie
The average secularist is apt to dismiss belief in ghosts or aliens as eccentric. But if you…
A Feast at the End of the World
Margaret Kennedy—novelist, playwright, historian, critic—is having another moment. Feted and famous after the 1924 publication of her…
How the Therapeutic Killed Academic Standards
Darel Paul’s excellent First Things article on the Jason Arday scandal pinpoints a number of the problems…
Left to Our Own Devices
Hiding in most of our pockets is a shiny black mirror with a logo on the back…
The Founders and the Common Good
The dominant public philosophy among American elites is modern liberalism, often referred to merely as “liberalism.” Two…
The Pope and the Antichrist
I recently lectured in Rome on the topic of the Antichrist. The Antichrist interests me for several reasons,…
To Live Fittingly
Why do the humanities face such a hostile climate? In part it’s because academics have excluded ordinary,…
Mad as Hell
In a simpler time, the internet was full of cats. Flooding message boards and YouTube with images…
Breaking the Mind
Philosopher James K. A. Smith suffered through a period of profound depression. He found solace and insight…
Centaur
The Etruscan centaur holds up his right hand,not palm outward as if to stop chariot trafficor solemnly…
A Celtic Skull in the Museum at La Tène
Two-thousand years and more untouched I burnedIn soil’s slow fire. On the beachAbove, ringed by thin, withered…
Asters
The asters bloom amid late-summer heat,Low-lying stars that will not linger longAnd bend their sprays beneath the…
Our American Babylon
Once upon a time—it was the 1976 bicentennial of the American founding, to be precise—I wrote a…
A Nation Under God
Our country has a long tradition of official encouragement of religion on a non-sectarian basis. That tradition…
America’s Two Foundings
Contrasting judgments often arise from studying the Niagara of words that justified the American War for Independence—together…
The Faith of the Founding
My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Walter Berns, has written that the philosophy of John Locke…
Self-Evident Truths and American Independence
One of the common reactions of the British to the American Declaration of Independence was astonishment at…
The Bible Cause at 200
Two hundred years ago this Spring, on May 11, 1816, representatives from local Bible societies around the…
