Archive

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...