The First Things Conclave
Who should be the next pope? Below are the nominations of First Things editors and contributors, some serious, some tongue-in-cheek. Enjoy…
May 2025
Print Edition
May 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
How Abortion Lost Its Cool
The Love Society and Its Enemies
Written by Karl Popper after he fled Austria in the late 1930s, The Open Society and Its…
How I Kicked My Phone Habit
About eighteen months ago, I decided I wanted a healthier relationship with my smartphone. My phone had…
Pure Episcopalianism
It was in June 2022 that my wife and I started looking for a home in Washington,…
Battle for Young Minds
If you happened to tune in to America’s most popular podcasts these last few months, you might’ve…
The First Things Podcast
Francis and Following
Conversations
The Bible’s Forgotten Women
The Editor’s Desk
The Problem of Embryo Ownership
The Jesuit Pope
Europe and America
In 2005, I published a small book entitled The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics…
The First Things Conclave
Who should be the next pope? Below are the nominations of First Things editors and contributors, some…
Letters from Rome 2025—The Papal Interregnum No. 3
Along the Tiber: Lessons from the Past for the Present by Francis X. Maier “It’s a perfect…
The Last Modern Pope
Who am I to judge? More and more, the earth, our home, seems to resemble an immense…
Feminism Against Fertility
When Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, the boys crowed and the girls cried. At least…
Francis in Full
By common consensus, Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio won the papacy by means of an intervention he made…
The Right Has Forgotten Feeling
I’m not sure how I got here, into these pages. Lately I’ve found myself in a lot…
Song of Thanksgiving
On the cover of Nicholas Chong’s new book, The Catholic Beethoven, the skies are blue. That in…
Immaterial World
Light of the Mind, Light of the World:Illuminating Science Through Faithby spencer a. klavanskyhorse, 272 pages, $29.99…
Liberal Integralists
The Church Against the State:On Subsidiarity and Sovereigntyby andrew willard jonesnew polity, 321 pages, $34.95 Eight years…
Lift My Chin, Lord
Lift my chin, Lord,Say to me,“You are not whoYou feared to be,Not Hecate, quite,With howling sound,Torch held…
Spring Twilight After Penance
Let’s say you’ve just comeFrom confession. Late sunPours through the budding treesThat mark the brown creek washing Itself…
For an English Teacher
You died, but it was not your words that faltered. You’d husbanded the language all your life, And when…
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…
