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Articles
Hygienic Relics
NPR reports that a Swiss company is one of several firms offering the bereaved the chance to transform their loved ones’ ashen remains into diamonds as postmortem keepsakes. In three...
Papal Distinctions
Along with being named person of the year by Time , Pope Francis has gained a similar accolade from a zeitschrift of more rarified interest, namely, The Advocate , the nation’s...
Transgender Denial at Smith College
Feminism of the primitive observance meets Third-wave feminism in this unusual story . Calliope Wong, who self-identifies as neither male nor female, applied to the famously “lifestyle left” and...
Offending Analogies
During the Supreme Court’s oral arguments yesterday examing Proposition 8, Chief Justice John Roberts entertained an analogy for the move to redefine marriage: If you tell a child that...
The Journalist’s Index of Forbidden Phrases
Carlos Lozada, editor of the Washington Post ‘s Outlook section, provides a fantastic list of some of the hackneyed words and phrases his stylebook forbids. It’s striking to see...
Praying with Pope Francis
Pope Francis is a pontiff of firsts—-the first Jesuit, the first Francis (of Assisi, not the Jesuit Francis Xavier), and the first pope from the New World, and indeed...
A Capuchin Pope?
For the small percentage they comprise of Catholics worldwide, Italians are disproportionately represented in the Roman Curia and ecclesial governance more broadly, not to mention their long history of...
“Except the New York Times”
It seems a safe bet that First Things’ beloved founder would have been a kindred spirit to Amos Shuchman, a New Yorker whose obituary appeared earlier this month in...
Clerics as the Clerisy
Duncan Stroik writes in Crisis of the need for priests and seminarians to achieve literacy in art and architecture, expected as they are to play the role of...
Boasting Honestly
Wall Street recruiters receive their fill of curious applications, with some aspirants inflating GPA figures and test scores, and others presenting overwrought or bluffed accounts of job skills and...
Obituaries for Earthbound Pets
A few years back, First Things published a somewhat incredulous While We’re At It entry noticing the curiously named Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, a service that promised to take care...
Marriage Ad Absurdum
In their forthcoming book on marriage, Robert George, Sherif Girgis, and Ryan Anderson warn (in context of their broader argument) that it serves no one’s interests to define marriage...
On Supersized Words
Patrick Ross, author of The Artist’s Road blog, enjoins English speakers and news producers to stem the tide of “word inflation” when reporting compelling news items, this week’s...
No Satisfaction in Same-Sex Marriage
It’s no secret that one major undercurrent of the same-sex marriage movement is the desire to change the marriage culture—-family and childrearing norms, for instance—-not simply to realize the...
Manual Labor, Academe, and Baseball
Joe Carter’s column this week draws on the autobiographical to illustrate an important point of comparison between workers in the world of labor and their counterparts in the world...