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Articles
With God in Russia
Colbert Report chaplain and envoy-at-large to the entertainment community, Jim Martin, S.J., has announced the very good news that Walter Ciszek’s With God In Russia, is now available on...
Freedom, Gratitude, and Ideology
The term “exceptional” often becomes a dirty word when paired with a nation’s claim to it. It becomes an obscenity when the nation is the United States. A glimpse...
Riot in the Cathedral
What in God’s name are you doing? With deference, this question is directed to the President of The Russian Federation, and more pointedly, to his ecclesial counterpart, the Patriarch...
Just War, In Theory and Practice
A couple of weeks back, Robert George delivered a First Thoughts post exhorting Catholics to take more seriously the moral hazards involved in the use of drones in war....
Metropolitan Jonah’s Resignation
Readers may know by now that Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen, leader of the Orthodox Church in America, resigned suddenly this past Friday night. It was Rod Dreher who broke the...
The Death of Death’s Long Life
Dear Readers, First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve...
A Man for Our Season
Today is the feast of Pope St. Martin I, who refused a seventh-century government mandate–to remain silent on the issue of monothelitism, a heresy which denies Christ exercised both human...
Doubt and the Creed
There are times, even in polite company, when a believer can feel like the last duck left in hunting season, flapping past the blind in a bulls-eye patterned sweater....
Bear Trap
Tensions between Ukraine and Russia, (On The Square: “ Putinism and the Ukrainian Catholic Church ” ) spiked the moment former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, received the maximum,...
Putinism and the Ukrainian Catholic Church
On March 25th of this year, Sviatoslav Shevchuk was elected head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC). Are those crickets I hear? The sound of one hand clapping,...
Robert Sargent Shriver – Eternal Memory
Some decades ago, I witnessed an expression of pastoral tenderness that remains with me to this day. The mother of a dear friend died suddenly – at a very...
MSNBC-Ya Later?
There’s blood in the water of the MSNBC snark tank. Friday it was announced that Keith Olbermann had been suspended—indefinitely. He apparently violated a corporate policy that forbids newsies...
Lunch With Mr. Sorensen
Years ago, my mother and father, brother and I spent our summer vacations at the Downingtown Motor Inn in Pennsylvania. To me it was Shangri-la; a place of enchantment...
What’s My Line (Of Scrimmage)
In yesterday’s On The Square, El Jefe offers an admittedly ambivalent musing on the disappearance of a once-unified culture, captured by the once-popular, What’s My Line? Dorothy Kilgallen was...
Go Left on Religion Street
In case you haven’t yet heard, Annuntio vobis aenigma magna: the Huffington Post has inaugurated a religion section! Should it choose to take the Washington Post ’s “On Faith”...
