Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
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Articles
The Erosion of Sin
Readers of the April issue of First Things will have seen James F. Keating’s learned and perceptive review of James M. O’Toole’s excellent book For I Have Sinned: The...
Books On My Mind
Do you remember those illustrations (which used to be very common) that showed, say, a deliberately jokey “map” of what was in someone’s brain or “on their mind”? That...
An Endless Bookshelf
Sometimes when I am starting a column, I look back to see what I wrote for this space roughly a year ago. I did so earlier this week, and...
On Getting Old
Two years plus a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column that began thus: “I am and always have been a creature of routine.” And that was very...
Unseen Skies
If you have been following this column for a while, you know I love the very idea of “forthcoming books”; you may recall my account of learning, for the...
Past and Future Hopes
A year ago at this time, I devoted a column to “Hopes and Wishes for 2024”—mostly hopes, as it turned out, but with a handful of wishes. (I was...
A Year of Reading: 2024
A year ago, after a series of annual lists that grew longer and longer, I changed the format of this feature, making it much more manageable in size and...
Finding Order in the Pieces
In October of 2023, I wrote a column here about how I came to be doing jigsaw puzzles—every day!—with my wife, Wendy, something I could never have imagined. We...
Immigration Realities
If you have followed this column for a while, you will have gathered that there are a lot of books in our house. Even so, should you ever visit,...
Book Recommendations for Christmas
October is almost gone (we’ve had a lovely fall season here in Wheaton), and it’s time—if you haven’t done so already—to start thinking about Christmas gifts. If you are...
Writing Mothers
In April of this year, I wrote about Nadya Williams’s Cultural Christians in the Early Church: A Historical and Practical Introduction to Christians in the Greco-Roman World, published near...
Rock Lessons
Late in October 2018, I wrote a First Things column called “A Sense of Time,” most of which was devoted to a then-new book by Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How...
September Reflections
The month of September is particularly resonant for me. As some faithful readers may recall, it was on September 16, 1966, a Friday, that I first met Wendy, in...
On Forthcoming Books
If you have been following this column for a while, you know I am an obsessive reader and accumulator of books. Some of you may recall my account of...
Do Protestants Believe in Present-Day Miracles?
Recently Christianity Today published a substantial review of Carlos Eire’s fascinating book They Flew: A History of the Impossible. Eire’s book examines seemingly “impossible” accounts of miraculous events—levitation, witchcraft,...
