Archive

Jan Morris (1926–2020) was a writer of astounding gifts who not only recorded history but made it. First, as the young reporter James Morris, he joined the successful 1953 British...

In this episode, First Things senior editor Dan Hitchens joins R. R. Reno on The Editor’s Desk to talk about his recent essay, “The Making of Roger Scruton,” from...

Cambridge, October 1964. A new undergraduate named Mary Hoffman is sitting in the corner at a party, feeling sorry for herself. She doesn’t know anybody, the friends she arrived...

In June 2025 Janet Daby, the Member of Parliament for Lewisham East, started having nightmares: terrible images of death and dying that disturbed her sleep and haunted her conscience....

For conservative Christian nerds it is a hammer blow. Imagine the grief and shock if Taylor Swift were to announce that she was giving up songwriting to focus on...

In this episode, First Things senior editor Dan Hitchens joins Virginia and Germán to discuss Magnifica Humanitas. Is it a disappointment or a triumph? Is it really a Boomer...

Reading—for obvious reasons—Henri Daniel-Rops’s The Church in the Dark Ages, I have been repeatedly struck by the truism that moments of institutional crisis demand genuinely great leaders. Movements, forces, trends...

Eloquent, determined, heedless of personal risk, the British journalist Derek Humphry was a born campaigner. In 1975 he helped his cancer-stricken wife to commit suicide, then wrote a book...

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the leading conservative thinker of his generation, regarded politics with distaste; he voted for the Tories, he said, “because they do the least harm.” The...

Who am I to judge? More and more, the earth, our home, seems to resemble an immense pile of filth. We don’t need to be like rabbits. Make a...

“I think religion has got everything appallingly wrong,” Sir Diarmaid ­MacCulloch told an interviewer in 2015, “and it has been terrible for us in sexual terms.” Now here is the book to prove it, and you could not find a...

Once, the story goes, man stood at the center of the universe. He looked in the mirror and saw a masterpiece: “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty...

The pope is dead. Sede vacante. From the round earth’s imagined corners come the 120 cardinal-electors, the progressive and the conservative, the extrovert and the taciturn, the Latin and the...

How can Britain’s assisted suicide bill, which comes before the House of Commons on Friday, possibly fail? Although it is not an official government bill, the prime minister is...

The Sound of Silence: The Life and Canceling of a Heroic Jesuit Priestby karen hallcrisis, 240 pages, $18.95 Near the start of this book, there is an unexpectedly absorbing...