Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
Articles
Exorcising Demons
Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry By Frank Walsh. Yale University Press, 394 pages, $35 Few of the Catholics who in the 1930s and...
Choosing Abundance
The late avant-garde composer John Cage once urged as a basic principle that we “choose abundance rather than scarcity. Be wasteful, rather than pinchpenny. Get as much as you...
Civilization and Wilderness
Into the Wild By Jon Krakauer Villard, 207 pages, $22 Jon Krakauer has written a thoroughly familiar American story. Its central figure, a recent college graduate named Chris McCandless,...
Living with Numbers
After suffering through elementary arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and trigonometry it is easy to believe with the Pythagoreans that everything is number, or with St. Matthew that “the very hairs...
The Necessary Devil
According to a recent Gallup poll, 52 percent of people say they believe in the Devil. One can imagine that this slim majority is not good news for the...
Democracy’s Discontents
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America by robert hughes oxford university press, 210 pages, $19.95 This book immerses us in the discontents that derive from our sexual, ethnic,...
Saving the World
In the Fall 1991 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly , which is very usefully devoted to the problems of unity and diversity in the contemporary world, Isaiah Berlin observes...
The Cultural Middle Ground
The Making Of Middlebrow Culture by Joan Shelley Rubin University of North Carolina Press, 416 pages, $34.95 What Joan Shelley Rubin aims to do in The Making of Middlebrow...
Victims Unlimited
In this highly individualistic age, it is probably safe to assume about every victim what Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina assumes about every unhappy family: that each...
Suffering Humanity
Victims and Values: A History and a Theory of Suffering by Joseph A. Amato Praeger, 223 pages, $14.95 It is not hard to imagine the common sense reaction to...
The Advent of Literary Science
It is now more than thirty years since C. P. Snow’s Cambridge Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” popularized the notion of a dangerous rift between...
1789: A Requiem
Perhaps no English poem was more frequently cited during France’s 1989 Bicentennial year than William Wordsworth’s Prelude, in Book XI of which one finds “Bliss was it in that...
Modernism & Its Consequences
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Ageby modris ecksteinshoughton mifflin (a peter davison book), 396 pages, $24.95 Modris Eksteins’ disturbing and fascinating book...
