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Articles
What I Saw at the Longhouse Fashion Show
The Bushwick warehouse is dark and warm, illuminated only by spotlights trained on what is less a runway than an arena: a rectangle of sand and dirt perhaps forty...
Rewilding American Christianity
Umberto Eco, in a pair of essays now canonical in medieval studies, proposed that we are living in a new Middle Ages. “What is required to make a good...
Gatekeeping for the Barbarians
Gatekeepers serve an invaluable function in a healthy society. At their best, they ensure institutional competence, even excellence, and thus stability and a measure of continuity. They ensure men...
NatCon Against the Black Pill
A certain breed of conservative—over-read, much too sedentary, prone to debilitating nostalgia for gone-away worlds which might never have existed, dyspeptic, and given to morbid fantasies about our decadent...
Surgery is the New Sex
During an early scene in Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s latest film, the performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) reclines on a chaise longue as Timlin (Kristen Stewart)...
A Fruitful Fellowship
The First Things 2022 Spring Campaign seeks to raise $600,000 by June 30. To make your contribution, visit www.firstthings.com/donate. A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a student of one of...
Takeaways from the Debate over Tim Keller’s “Third Way”
Bulverism is perhaps the laziest of all rhetorical gambits. When C. S. Lewis coined the term in 1941, he described it like this: “to assume without discussion that [your opponent] is...
Holy Fear
On at least two occasions, my father found himself in public showdowns with Mad Max, an itinerant “Turn or Burn!” preacher who loved to make a spectacle of himself...
Keep Christianity Strange
The following contains spoilers for the series Midnight Mass. Not long after his first Communion, horror auteur Mike Flanagan began questioning the sheer weirdness of the Eucharist. “So, if...
The Cautionary Tale of Francis Collins
On June 8, 2019, Francis Collins finger-picked his guitar and sang Andy Grammer’s song “Don’t Give Up On Me” at the memorial service for a young man who had...
The Moral Heart of The Green Knight
J. R. R. Tolkien considered Sir Gawain and the Green Knight one of the greatest works of medieval English literature, an example of “literary alchemy,” “when old deep-rooted stories...
New Faiths of the Self
Strange Rites:New Religions For a Godless Worldby tara isabella burtonpublicaffairs, 320 pages, $28.00 C. S. Lewis wrote that to be modern is to be consumed by the magical impulse...
The Road to Condoning Cannibalism
I hardly know what to expect. Have you slaughtered a man before?” Bernd-Jürgen Brandes wrote to Armin Meiwes in a private chat on March 6, 2001. “Unfortunately, only in...
The Art of Spiritual Warfare
This Present Darknessby frank e. peretticrossway, 375 pages, $14.99 As a teenager, I was convinced that a spirit of false prophecy had attached itself to my neck. This spirit’s...
