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Articles
The Challenge of Christmas
This article is part of our 2023 year-end campaign series, featuring reflections from prominent authors on why First Things matters. To make your year-end campaign gift now, visit firstthings.com/donate. Richard...
1619 Rightly Understood
African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Idealsby david hackett fischersimon & schuster, 960 pages, $40 One of the most important things to be said about the New York...
The Claims of Memory
I write in defense of memory. Not Memory in her gaudy mythological form, the Titan goddess Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses—but memory as the glue that holds our...
Tucker Carlson, Class Traitor
The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalismby tucker carlsonthreshold editions, 288 pages, $28 Tucker Carlson has become such a fixture in the world of cable-television news that it’s...
Of Statues and Symbolic Murder
In our culture, we have gotten so used to the idea that “iconoclasm” is a good and admirable thing, a vigorous rethinking of hoary pieties and staid traditions, that...
Hebraism Redoubled
The blow to Christian egos may not be such a bad thing. Christians, particularly those in the West who are heirs to many centuries of political and cultural dominance,...
Liberalism After Liberalism
Liberalism After Liberalism” is one of three addresses given to a symposium on “After Liberalism,” put on in late February with the support of the Simon/Hertog Fund for Policy...
The Desert’s Austere Grace
It is not the kind of road you ever want to find yourself driving on in a hard rain or at night—or, if you are seriously acrophobic, at any...
The Living City
Works of social criticism often do not wear well, and even the best of them tend to fade in interest by their fiftieth birthday. Either the tools of analysis...
The Enduring Irving Kristol
I cannot claim to have known the late Irving Kristol very well. But each encounter was memorable, and none more so than the last, in May of 2009. It...
The Moral Economy of Guilt
In his grand and gloomy book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud identified the tenacious sense of guilt as “the most important problem in the development of civilization.” In...
Whig History at Eighty
It is odd that in the many recent discussions about what it might mean to pursue a more self-consciously “Christian” approach to scholarship, debates that were given fresh urgency...
Keeping Time
A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor New York Review Books, 112 pages, $12.95 paper One of the most memorable films of the decade was also one...
Mediating Institutions
To Empower People: From State to Civil Society Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Richard John Neuhaus and Peter Berger. American Enterprise Institute, 244 pages, $25. Because Richard John Neuhaus was...
What to Give a First Things Reader
Seeking ideas for presents this year, we asked several of our well-read friends and contributors for recommendations of a few wise, or fun, or disturbing books that every First...
