Trump’s NSS Is a Reality Check
Last week, the White House released a new National Security Strategy (NSS). It’s an annual ritual mandated by a 1986 act of Congress to ensure that the legislative branch…
December 2025
Print Edition
December 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
False Patriots
Kings, Behold and Wail
I was a full-time parish priest at a time when we still visited people in their homes.…
Taming the Tongue
On October 14, Politico reported on a group chat in which leaders of various Young Republicans groups…
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…
The First Things Podcast
Heritage and the Right
Conversations
The Church’s Answer to the World (ft. Carter Griffin)
The Editor’s Desk
The Sabbath is Back! (ft. J. J. Kimche)
A Catholic Approach to Immigration
Who’s Afraid of Scott Yenor?
Henry Olsen’s essay last week—“Does Heritage Support Discrimination Against Women?”—may be the worst Atlantic disaster since the…
Trump’s NSS Is a Reality Check
Last week, the White House released a new National Security Strategy (NSS). It’s an annual ritual mandated…
How Globalization Led to Tribalism
The recent attack by an Afghan national on two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., was not an…
Marriage Annulment and False Mercy
Pope Leo XIV recently told participants in a juridical-pastoral formation course of the Roman Rota that the…
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…
Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage
People can get used to most anything. Even the abyss may be rendered tolerable—or, for that matter,…
México Profundo
There is a narrative of Mexican history that might be called “liberal,” or perhaps more accurately “liberal-national-revolutionary.”…
How to Become a Low-Tech Family
Is there a life beyond the screen? In 2010, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows described what the internet…
Finest Pieces of Plastic
Writing early in 1810, diplomat and scholar Georg Griesinger gave the most detailed surviving account…
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.…
