Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
Articles
Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual
You’ve asked me how to become an intellectual. You’re young, it seems (only young people ask questions of that kind), and you think you might have an intellectual vocation,...
Against Capital Punishment
The Death Penalty, Volume Iby jacques derridatranslated by peggy kamufuniversity of chicago, 312 pages, $38 The Death Penalty, Volume IIby jacques derridatranslated by elizabeth rottenberguniversity of chicago, 304 pages,...
Ulterior Lives
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiographyby richard rodriguezviking, 256 pages, $26.95 Richard Rodriguez has been an occasional companion of mine for more than thirty years, since the publication of Hunger of...
Impossible Pluralism
Robert Bellah understands religion as an activity that takes us beyond the quotidian. The everyday world is ordered by lack, of food, shelter, sex, and so on; it is...
The Good Samaritan’s Burden
In his interestingly wrong-headed essay, Paul Miller argues that there are extraterritorial evils so great that they oblige the United States to intervene militarily to preempt them when they...
Public Life Without Political Theory
The following is a response to Patrick J. Deneen’s Unsustainable Liberalism. The other response, by Daniel J. Mahoney, can be found here . Patrick Deneen’s stimulating paper provides both...
Our Stories and God’s
The Sense of an Ending ?by Julian Barnes ?Knopf, 163 pages, $23.95 n You’re not the person you take yourself to be. That’s because the person you take yourself...
Review of Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar
Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar by Paul Griffiths CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, 235 PAGES, $24.95 n All men desire to know, said Aristotle at the beginning of his Metaphysics...
From Eire to Eternity
A Very Brief History of Eternity by Carlos Eire Princeton, 258 pages, $24.95 Carlos Eire, A Yale professor and the author of the 2003 National Book Award winner Waiting...
The Nature of Desire
“This is the monstrosity in love, lady,” Troilus tells Cressida in Shakespeare’s play, “that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the...
The Face of Civilization
Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart Yale, 249 pages, $28 At the center of David Bentley Hart’s brilliant new book is an...
The Very Autonomous Steven Pinker
In May, Steven Pinker published in the New Republic a jeremiad against dignity as a tool of thought in bioethics. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, works at...
Child of the Revolution
His Illegal Self by Peter Carey Knopf, 288 pages, $24.95 His Illegal Self is Peter Carey’s tenth novel. Two earlier ones, Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of...
Nor Certitude, Nor Peace
Saturday by Ian McEwan Doubleday, 304 pp., $26. Ian McEwan’s Saturday is his eighth novel, and perhaps his finest. It tells the story of a single Saturday, in early...
Offer Declined
The Future of Religion by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo Columbia University Press, 112 pp. $24.50 The Future of Religion is the perfect primer in post-metaphysical historicism: it’s short,...
