Out of the Wilderness
When the agnostic Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch died, he asked that his funeral be conducted in St. Peter’s Church in Zurich. But certain conditions applied: The service would…
August/September 2025
Print Edition
August/September 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
An Evangelical in Italy
The Post-Californian Ideology
On November 6, 1996, Al Gore called Peter Navarro to express his sympathy. Navarro, a left-leaning economics…
Paul’s Ethnic Gospel
Grace, not race”—so goes the tidy maxim by which many modern interpreters characterize Paul’s gospel. In this…
The Right to Be Killed
In the days surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., leaders of the civil rights movement…
No Chosen, No “Almost Chosen”
Mazal tov! Partisans on the left and on the right, fighting bitterly for a larger swath of…
The First Things Podcast
At Home and Abroad
Conversations
NovelCon
The Editor’s Desk
A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones
Obergefell Must Go
Abolishing Ourselves
Anyone who doubts that the abolition of man is a present-day reality need only look at the…
A Straight Line to the Pulpit: The Legacy of John MacArthur
In the middle of the twentieth century, with suburbs and churches exploding with intensity, novelist Peter De…
Planned Parenthood Defunded—For Now
In the three years that followed Dobbs, the pro-life movement may have sometimes felt like it was…
A Primer on Neo-Reaction
Xenosystemsby nick landpassage, 338 pages, $39.95 I read Nick Land’s Xenosystems on a sunny afternoon in California…
The King and the Swarm
The printing press did not just change how people shared information. It changed the normative patterns of…
Waugh Against the Fogeys
On June 17, 1953, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to a friend: “I am now preparing a…
The Future of Catholic Theology
About ten years ago I found myself in China teaching a weeklong philosophy seminar on the thought…
Out of the Wilderness
When the agnostic Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch died, he asked that his funeral be conducted…
The Great Excommunicator
When Sam Tanenhaus agreed in 1998 to write a biography of William F. Buckley Jr., it would…
Goodbye, Saffron
Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Themby bonnie lander johnsonhodder and stoughton, 320…
Second Death
Between our physical demise—when the soul, like a savedpage from a trashed notebook, lifts in the handof…
Forecast
How long can two people stay togetherwith this in the news and that in the sky? A…
Greetings on a Morning Walk
Blackberry vines, you hold this ground in the shade of a willow: all thorns, no fruit. *…
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.…
