Christianity is cropping up in unexpected places. This summer, Jordan Peterson chatted with Elon Musk. In his inimitable way, Peterson digressed into the long-dead religions of Mesopotamia, tying ancient wisdom to brain science. Musk responded with thoughtful comments about the meaning of life. The conversation was edifying, a nice change from the usual fare.
Then Peterson, who was wearing a loud dinner jacket featuring images of the Madonna and Child, took up the question of forgiveness and turning the other cheek. Musk confessed, “While I’m not particularly religious, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise.” He allowed that he is best described as “a cultural Christian,” and he observed that Christian beliefs have done a great deal of good in the world. “I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity. I think they’re very good.”
Musk was not confessing faith in Christ. Earlier in the interview, he had outlined his belief in what he calls “the religion of curiosity” or “the religion of enlightenment,” which involves asking the right questions about life. Nonetheless, Musk was staking out cultural territory for faith, expressing appreciation for the role and influence of Christianity.
Something similar had happened in the spring. While being interviewed, the famous atheist Richard Dawkins expressed his regret over Christianity’s diminished influence in British society. Like Musk, he stated that he is not a believer. He was quick to call fundamentalist Christianity pernicious nonsense and tangled with his interviewer over the credibility of Christian belief. In spite of that, he called himself a cultural Christian, and in the face of the rising influence of Islam he was keen to place himself on “Team Christian.”
It’s easy to make too much of passing comments like these. But we should not make too little of them either. Aaron Renn has observed that Christians in the United States now live in a “negative world.” In elite circles, a consensus holds that Christianity is largely a force for evil. Some see it as instilling a dangerous fanaticism, an eagerness to impose dogmas on others. Others fix on sexual morality and regard Christianity as the source of homophobia and other repressive pathologies.
Under present circumstances, therefore, it is notable when prominent and powerful figures say positive things about Christianity. What gives? Are we witnessing a revival of sorts, a cultural resurgence of Christian prestige? Yes and no—or, rather, no and yes.
The negative world that Renn documents is not abating. By some measures, it is intensifying. The New York Times and other organs of the liberal establishment eagerly stoke hysteria about “white Christian nationalism.” A coven of Bible-thumping racists is poised to take over the country! With astounding alacrity, the mainstream media turned JD Vance into a strange, alien, and vaguely threatening figure. His recent conversion to Catholicism was treated as a sign that the blue-eyed, bearded man from Ohio is “weird.”
There’s another dynamic at work, however, one that may be motivating the surge in pro-Christian statements. We live in a polarized country, which means that two sides are consolidating, opposing each other as solid blocks. In this political environment, progressives fix on Christianity as the emblem of all that is harmful to their dreams of a transformed America. As a consequence, those who dissent from progressive political and cultural dogmas, and are increasingly outspoken in their opposition, readily see themselves as members of “Team Christian.”
The full interview with Richard Dawkins makes clear that he is troubled by the consequences of Britain’s hectoring multicultural ideology. The interview took place on Easter weekend, and Dawkins was dismayed that government officials were encouraging the populace to celebrate Ramadan, not the Christian holiday. Had the multicultural commissars been less brazen, were the reigning ideology less aggressive, I doubt Dawkins would have expressed any sympathy for Christianity. He would have remained stuck in the anti-religious ruts of his 2006 book, The God Delusion. Dawkins and Alan Sokal recently penned an op-ed criticizing the politically correct conceit that sex is “assigned at birth” rather than established at conception (the obvious scientific truth). Here as well, his staunch opposition to faith notwithstanding, the realities of the political scene put him and his opposition to transgender ideology on “Team Christian.”
Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk are notorious for their violations of progressive rules and regulations about what can be said or thought. This does not make them believers in Christ as the Risen Lord but puts them on the same side as Christians who are deemed “deplorables,” often for the same reasons. Put simply, as Christianity is targeted by progressives, its cultural intransigence becomes a rallying point for those who oppose progressivism, even as they reject Christianity’s theological precepts.
Last year, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained why she had converted to Christianity. She framed her turn to faith in terms of a “civilizational war,” one element of which rests in the necessity of resisting woke ideology, “which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.” The tools of science and liberal principles are insufficient to meet the challenge. She observes that if we are to renew a culture of freedom, we must return to the deepest roots of the West, the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Ali recognizes that faith is not a cultural-political position in a civilizational struggle. It’s a personal turn toward God, a giving of oneself to the Lord. I’ll wager, however, that her journey to faith began as a cultural commitment and matured into a theological one. This pathway is and will be traveled by others. I can well imagine a college student falling in with Christian peers, saying, “I’m not a believer, but with them I’m free to speak my mind.” That’s not a declaration of faith, but it points in the right direction.
It’s common to note that many come to church for community, or because they seek the beauty found in the music and liturgy. As Samira Kawash observes in this issue (“The Campus Ministry Boom”), these natural goods often draw us to the supernatural good of God himself. The same holds for a healthy culture, a coherent moral framework, and the freedom to use one’s reason.
I had in mind Christianity’s rising prestige among rebels against woke tyranny when I composed the concluding paragraphs of a review of two recent volumes on today’s negative world (Renn’s Life in the Negative World and John Daniel Davidson’s Pagan America) for the Claremont Review of Books:
In the negative world, Christianity is not part of the dominant regime. This imposes burdens. The outsider does not get preferment, and he’s sometimes persecuted. . . . But we are living in a time when populism is on the rise. The insiders are under assault. And people know that the architects of the present, shitty regime, and the enforcers of its increasingly insane dogmas, are not evangelical pastors or Catholic bishops.
In 2016, a large body of alienated, angry Americans noticed that a brash, boastful New York developer attracted the ire of the Great and the Good. The more he was denounced, the more they loved him. Perhaps something similar will happen in the spiritual realm. The more hostile the people who brought us Drag Queen Story Hour are toward Christianity, the more obvious it will be that the churches are an alternative to our failing regime. Will people who are sick and tired of the Rainbow Reich begin to say, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”?
It’s a hard time to be a pastor or priest. But it’s a good time. Dissent is growing. Few young people trust educational institutions, and for good reason. They’re aware that they have grown up in a cesspool of pornography, have been poisoned by social media, and were sacrificed on the altar of COVID lockdowns. Some, maybe more than a few, will turn to Christ as an anchor in the dissolving, disintegrating culture of the post-Christian West. When a house is collapsing, it’s a great advantage to be on the outside.
May the tribe of cultural Christians grow.
Solidarity and Freedom
I recently re-read The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. Penned by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the aftermath of World War II, the book is a marvelous combination of astute social analysis and political polemic. Schlesinger was very nearly the perfect embodiment of an established postwar figure: the partisan intellectual. I don’t disparage that role, for obvious reasons.
Born in 1917, Schlesinger came of age during FDR’s long tenure in the White House. The New Deal transformed the economic foundations of America, putting liberalism in the driver’s seat and giving it “a positive and confident ring.” The same liberal regime oversaw the American triumph in World War II. As he was writing in the late 1940s, on the crest of the American Century, Schlesinger could announce that liberalism stood “for responsibility and for achievement.”
The theme of a grown-up and “virile” liberalism runs throughout The Vital Center. Schlesinger’s main adversary is, by implication, the immature and naive progressive, whom he calls a “doughface” liberal. Show trials and campaigns of extermination had shown the Soviet Union to be an inhumane totalitarian regime, and the rise of fascism demonstrated modern man’s vulnerability to demagogues. “My generation,” Schlesinger observes, was reminded “rather forcibly that man was, indeed, imperfect, and that the corruptions of power could unleash great evil in the world.”
These two experiences—the positive achievements of New Deal liberalism and the looming peril of totalitarianism—shape the “vital center” that Schlesinger details through the 250 pages of his book. On the one hand, postwar liberals retained confidence in the capacity of social and economic experts. They proposed and implemented policies that aimed to improve the material and moral conditions of society. On the other hand, tutored by the horrors of tyrannical utopianism, the postwar liberals recognized that the essential task of our time is to defend “the ultimate integrity of the individual.” Social planning then and now must always be subject to a crucial test: Does it protect and promote freedom?
As the twentieth century was ending, Zygmunt Bauman coined the term “liquid modernity.” The basic insight had been formulated one hundred years earlier. In 1897, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology, published Suicide. He correlated the rise of suicide with the rapid industrialization and urbanization of society. The modernizing process had severely disrupted the thick, stable realities of agrarian life. Durkheim speculated that, deprived of strong norms and cast into an anonymous, rapidly changing commercial society, individuals became disoriented and distressed, a condition that tempted them to self-harm.
The analysis was deepened and extended by many social theorists in the early twentieth century. Schlesinger adapts it to explain totalitarianism. Industrialization and other modern trends have produced great benefits, he writes, but “at the expense of the protective tissue which had bound together feudal society.” The whirling wheel of technological change disorients. “Our modern industrial economy, based on impersonality, interchangeability and speed, has worn away the old protective securities without creating new ones.”
When individuals are deprived of a warm sense of belonging, freedom becomes a burden. “Man longs to escape the pressures beating down on his frail individuality; and more and more, the surest means of escape seems to be to surrender that individuality to some massive, external authority.” Thus the appeal of totalitarianism: “Against the loneliness and rootlessness of man in free society, it promises the security and comradeship of crusading unity.”
As John Owen explained in the last issue (“Liberalism’s Fourth Turning”), the leitmotif of the liberal tradition is freedom. What poses the greatest threat to liberty? How is freedom best promoted and protected? In Schlesinger’s telling, the anomie and atomization brought by modern technological change provide fertile ground for totalitarianism. The defenders of freedom must address this danger with economic management in order to moderate the dynamism of a capitalist economy. “We must somehow give the lonely masses a sense of individual human function, we must restore community to the industrial order.”
Schlesinger was aware of the paradox imposed upon his generation. There needed to be technocratic management to ensure social solidarity, but not so much as to usurp individual responsibility and smother individual freedom. Here’s one of his sweeping formulations: “We require individualism which does not wall man off from community; we require community which sustains but does not suffocate the individual.” He urges a defense of freedom that has the “virile” (he uses this term repeatedly) courage to take up the challenge of governing and guiding society in perilous times. There can be no set formula for attaining this goal. It requires a Goldilocks balance, enough technocratic management, but not too much—a “vital center.”
I admire Schlesinger and his cohort of postwar liberals. They were right about the unsettled condition of Western societies in the mid-twentieth century, which made them vulnerable to utopian politics of the left and right. They were correct to counsel against formulaic political programs. Politics is an art. We must identify the besetting diseases afflicting the body politic, which we can at best remediate and balance. The fall of man blocks any fantasy of a cure.
In Return of the Strong Gods, I argue that the vital center outlined by Schlesinger was unstable because it tilted in the direction of openness and deconsolidation. The postwar liberals recognized that we needed solidarity—trustworthy anchors in a modern world of accelerating change. But their anti-totalitarian consensus took a great deal for granted.
Schlesinger had the luxury of writing at a time when American society was swinging in a culturally conservative direction. Men returning from war married. There was a baby boom. Churches filled. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s political career was torpedoed when he divorced his wife in 1962.
Historians underestimate the signal importance of the strong moral consensus of those decades. The French speak of the three decades after World War II as the trente glorieuses, the “thirty glorious” years. Americans are less effusive. Race riots and Vietnam marred the 1960s. Nevertheless, those decades increasingly evoke nostalgia. It was a time of historically low income inequality. Politics was not rancorously partisan. A man working in a factory could buy a modest suburban home, support a family, and take an annual vacation to Atlantic City. Civic institutions were strong.
American stability, prosperity, and happiness during those years rested as much on cultural foundations as economic ones—perhaps more so. Those foundations have been eroded. Wave after wave of “liberation” has disintegrated the postwar middle-class consensus. That consensus has been derided as racist, patriarchal, homophobic, and xenophobic. As a consequence, the great majority of Americans are deprived of a solid, stable, and home-building moral and social consensus. Today, marriage is in tatters. Homes are broken. Our political culture is riven by bitter polarization. Our institutions are distrusted.
In the face of this disintegration, a new totalitarian temptation has emerged. It is not communist or fascist. Rather, it manifests in technocratic means of social control. Matthew Crawford recently reported on the British government’s schemes to blunt and suppress public hostility to mass migration. Jacob Siegel has documented the ways in which American elites and government officials have transformed the instruments used to prosecute the post-9/11 war on terror into a multifaceted domestic security state. The Covid lockdowns revealed that the people who are running things in the West have a strong appetite for social control.
It’s easy to become paranoid. I try to resist. But we must not be naive. In this tumultuous decade, we need someone like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., someone with the intelligence and imagination to explain to American elites that the cultural revolutions of recent decades have atomized our society, undermined solidarity, and disoriented the majority of Americans. We need a new vital center, a politics of moral and cultural reconsolidation that has the same courage to denounce the Human Rights Campaign that Schlesinger had in condemning the “doughface” liberals.
Don’t Constitutionalize the Rainbow Reich
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Texas handed down a decision (Texas v. Loe) upholding that state’s law prohibiting medically irreversible and damaging transgender treatments for minors. The Court held that, in passing the statute, the Texas legislature employed its constitutionally legitimate power to promote the health and welfare of the state’s citizens. The law does not infringe upon the rights of parents to determine the medical care of their children or the rights of doctors to provide care.
Justice Jimmy Blacklock wrote a concurring opinion that laid out the issues at stake with exemplary clarity. He observed that the case turned on fundamental and mutually exclusive assumptions about what it means to be human.
Within the Traditional Vision, human males and females do not “identify” as men and women. We are men and women, irreducibly and inescapably, no matter how we feel. Proceeding from these moral and philosophical premises, the Traditional Vision naturally holds that medicinal or surgical interference with a child’s developing capacity for normal, healthy sexual reproduction is manifestly harmful to the child, an obvious injustice unworthy of the high label “medicine.”
Against this view, Blacklock ranges the alternative—“call it the Transgender Vision.” This view “holds that we all have a ‘sex assigned at birth,’” and thus assigned, it “may or may not correspond to our inwardly felt or outwardly expressed ‘gender identity.’” Under these assumptions, “the Transgender Vision holds that an adolescent child who feels out of place in a biologically normal body should in many cases take puberty-blocking drugs designed to retard or prevent the emergence of sexual characteristics out of line with the child’s gender identity.” It manifestly follows that parents and children have a right to this kind of treatment, just as they have a right to other medical procedures that promote well-being.
The Traditional and Transgender Visions “diverge at the most basic level.” The disagreement is metaphysical, as it were. Judges need to recognize that debates over medical procedures and disputes about empirical claims concerning the efficacy of transgender treatments “are merely the surface-level consequences of deep disagreement over the deepest questions about who we are.” The Traditional Vision sees the treatments as “self-evidently harmful to children,” whereas the Transgender Vision regards the same treatments as “necessary medical care.”
The constitutional question amounts to this: Does the Texas Legislature have the proper constitutional authority to legislate in accord with the Traditional Vision? Or does the Transgender Vision enjoy a special, privileged constitutional status, which the court must honor? Blacklock observes that it would be very strange for a judge to answer “no” and “yes.” How could anyone reasonably hold that the Traditional Vision, which has held sway from time immemorial, can’t serve as a rational basis for determining what accords with the health and welfare of citizens? And on what basis can a judge determine that the Transgender Vision enjoys privileged status, given the fact that it has never “obtained the consent of the People of Texas”?
A great deal of testimony in this case came from medical experts, who insisted that interventions to facilitate “transitioning” enjoy the approval of medical associations and other professional bodies. Blacklock notes that such testimony is irrelevant. “The Texas Constitution authorizes the Legislature to regulate ‘practitioners of medicine.’ It does not authorize practitioners of medicine to regulate the Legislature—no matter how many expert witnesses they bring to bear.” Quite right. Doctors and researchers are free to adopt metaphysical assumptions. But so are legislators. And when those assumptions conflict, those of elected legislators determine the law, not those of “experts.”
Blacklock gets to the nub of our debates about transgender ideology (and pinpoints the specious reasoning of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision): Those urging transgender rights “claim that the Transgender Vision is an established matter of science, not a matter of belief.” But saying it does not make it so. “From the perspective of the Traditional Vision”—I would say, from the perspective of any clear-thinking person—“any such assertion is an inherent conflation of speculative philosophy and empirical science. Neither a philosophical proposition (‘gender identity is real’) nor a moral rule (‘gender identity should be affirmed’) can be proven with scientific method or the tools of medicine.”
Medical associations, academic journals, and universities have become captive to progressive ideologies, transgender ideology among them. They are certainly not trustworthy sources of moral wisdom. And they are increasingly untrustworthy sources of empirical truths. Kudos to Justice Blackwood for so clearly explaining why their distorted moral presumptions and perverted science should not be accorded transcendent legal authority.
WHILE WE'RE AT IT
♦ In this issue, we published the winner of the first annual First Things poetry prize, “Two Owls” by Josiah A. R. Cox. Second place went to Ryan Wilson for his sonnet “Gather Ye,” also published in this issue. Congratulations to both poets. Our founder, Richard John Neuhaus, recognized the significance of literary art. The politics of politics is an important affair, to be sure. But we can only vote for what we can imagine, which means that any publication with political interests (and First Things certainly has such commitments) worth its salt must leaven and refine our imaginations. Many thanks to the Tim & Judy Rudderow Foundation for its generous support in establishing this new prize.
♦ Henri de Lubac (Paradoxes of Faith): “When the world makes its way into the Church itself, it is worse than just being the world. Of the world it has neither the greatness in its illusory glamor nor that sort of loyalty it has in mendacity, ill nature and envy, which are taken as granted as being its law.” Again: “When the ecclesiastical world is worldly, it is only a caricature of the world. It is the world, not only in greater mediocrity, but even in greater ugliness.” Yet again: “There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever-moderate appearance, there is nothing more intemperate, nothing surer of its instinct, nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy.”
♦ Sigrid Undset: “I have the sense that I am seeking my sea legs all alone in a world full of currents, and I long for a fixed point of reference that doesn’t alter or slide eel-like away; I long for the old Church on the rock, which has never claimed that a thing is good because it is new or good because it is old, but which, on the contrary, takes for its sacrament wine, which is at its best old, and bread, best fresh.”
♦ A prescient Edward Luttwak writing in 1994:
What does the moderate Right—mainstream US Republicans, British Tories and all their counterparts elsewhere—have to offer? Only more free trade and globalisation, more deregulation and structural change, thus more dislocation of lives and social relations. It is only mildly amusing that nowadays the standard Republican/Tory after-dinner speech is a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community “values” that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one. Thus at the present time the core of Republican/Tory beliefs is a perfect non-sequitur. And what does the moderate Left have to offer? Only more redistribution, more public assistance, and particularist concern for particular groups that can claim victim status, from the sublime peak of elderly, handicapped, black lesbians down to the merely poor.
♦ James Pogue penned an interesting report on the thinking of Connecticut senator Chris Murphy (“The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses,” New York Times, August 19, 2024). Here’s the senator’s assessment after spending the last two years observing debates in conservative circles, some conducted by anonymous Twitter provocateurs: “What I discovered, much to my chagrin, was that the right—some really irresponsible corners of the right—were having a conversation about the spiritual state of America that was in ways much more relevant than conversations that were happening on the left.” In discussions with Pogue, Murphy expressed worries (in Pogue’s words) “that the New Right was offering two things mainstream Democrats were not: a politics that spoke directly to feelings of alienation from America as we know it today and a political vision of what a rupture with that system might look like.” That’s exactly what we strive to offer in First Things.
♦ John Henry Newman: “I would rather have to maintain that we ought to begin by believing everything that is offered to our acceptance, than that it is our duty to doubt everything.” Newman is surely right. Newman is not advising blanket credulity. He is formulating a provocative juxtaposition of extremes so as to illuminate the foundation for a life of reason. To believe everything means taking on a great deal of falsehood, but truth as well. The opposite, the Cartesian approach, which so many presume to be the high road of reason, avoids error—at the expense of taking in truths. Better a credulous mind that adheres to truth at the cost of superstition, errant opinion, and foolishness than a mind too fearful of falsehood to close upon truth.
♦ Newman on the same theme, this time framed in terms of Christ’s return, which Scripture warns us will be sudden: “True it is, that in many times, many ages, have Christians been mistaken in thinking they discerned Christ’s coming, but better a thousand times to think Him coming when he is not, than once to think Him not coming when He is.” Where is the foolishness? Is it to be found in the pious man who reads the signs of the times and anticipates Christ’s return? Or in the man who notes the many false predictions of past believers and shuns the disposition of anticipation? “Now he must come one day, sooner or later,” Newman continues. “Worldly men have their scoff at our failure of discernment now; but whose will be the want of discernment, whose the triumph then?” Newman’s logic echoes Pascal’s wager. What could be more consequential than to meet our Lord’s return with an upturned heart? To be wrong a thousand times is as nothing compared to being right when everything is at stake.
♦ The early-twentieth-century Dominican Thomist A. G. Sertillanges makes a similar point: “We must give ourselves from the heart if truth is to give herself to us,” for “truth serves only her slaves.” Sertillanges again: “Truth visits those who love her, who surrender to her.” Pious acceptance is the foundation of truth-seeking, not today’s pseudo-virtue, “critical thinking.”
♦ I draw the Sertillanges quotes from The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. This wonderful book, which remains in print, should be read by anyone who wishes to bring into his life the discipline of serious reading and reflection.
♦ An astute observation by Mike Woodruff: “Modern society lacks a term for sin, so people are categorized as evil.”
♦ Adrian Pabst meditating on the West’s perverse combination of moral and spiritual aggression and disarmament (“Against the New Barbarisms,” Compact):
Rather than a productive critical reassessment of its past, the West now risks a suicidal betrayal. Parts of the elites and the population seem to hate the West more than its enemies, to the point of believing that sexual minorities should support Hamas. Protesters blame all evils of the world on the West while singing the praises of Hamas terrorists and their barbarous killings of innocent Israeli citizens—viewed as legitimate targets, just because they are all deemed to be “colonial settlers.” Western self-loathing is no less nihilistic than the barbarianism it legitimates.
♦ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (from one of his characters in In the First Circle): “Prosperity breeds idiots.”
♦ At times I feel dispirited. Dobbs exposed the extent of popular support for abortion. Legalized marijuana fills the streets of New York with the stench of weed. Wars grind on in Ukraine and Gaza. Illegal immigrants flow across the border, in spite of popular opposition. When I’m oppressed by the thought that mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, I return to another one of Solzhenitsyn’s insights: “It is up to us to stop seeing Progress (which cannot be stopped by anyone or anything) as a stream of unlimited blessing, and to view it rather as a gift from on high, sent down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will.” The same holds for Regress. Let’s stop wringing our hands and do what we can and must, leaving the ultimate disposition of the affairs of men in God’s hands.
♦ In my meditations above, I commend the phenomenon of cultural Christianity—and suggest that it’s likely to reflect a growing cohort of fellow travelers. If you know someone in this tribe of unbelieving, Christian-friendly dissidents from the Rainbow Reich, please give that person a gift subscription to First Things.
♦ Many thanks to Ramona Tausz for seven years of excellent editorial work at First Things. Ramona started as a junior fellow in 2017 and, after two years in that role, stepped up to become an associate and then deputy editor. For many years, she oversaw our web publications. At the opening of his 2023 Erasmus Lecture, Carl Trueman, a regular columnist, singled out Ramona as an editor who unfailingly made his writing clearer, sharper, and more penetrating. He was right to do so. Ramona has been a great asset to our editorial team. We will miss her talent—and her Missouri Synod Lutheran sangfroid.
♦ We have added two new junior fellows to the First Things staff. Jacob Akey is a graduate of Saint Anselm College. Germán Saucedo comes to us from Mexico City, where he recently completed a degree in law at Universidad Panamericana.
♦ Claire Giuntini has served as a junior fellow and assistant editor. She is taking a new role at First Things as director of the Editor’s Circle, our faithful company of supporters who contribute $1,000 or more each year.
♦ Our annual Intellectual Retreat in early August was a smashing success. Justin Shubow delivered a fine lecture detailing the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s civic architecture. Eighty participants spent a day discussing faith and civic responsibility, a timeless topic that is especially timely right now. Brian Williams and his team of seminar leaders from Templeton Honors College at Eastern University led the discussions with expert skill. Sohrab Ahmari, Mark Bauerlein, and your faithful scribe commented and opined during a concluding panel discussion of the retreat’s themes. A special thanks goes to Taylor Posey, who designed a handsome volume of assigned readings.
♦ First Things devotees are reminded that our annual Erasmus Lecture is scheduled for Monday, October 28 at 6 p.m. (location: New York’s Union League Club). Paul Kingsnorth will deliver this year’s lecture: “Against Christian Civilization.” Visit our website to register for tickets.
♦ Erasmus festivities include a poetry reading on the Sunday before Paul Kingsnorth’s lecture (October 27). Our poet this year will be Adam Kirsch, poetry editor of the New Criterion. The reading begins at 5 p.m. and will take place at the First Things office: 9 East 40th Street, 10th Floor.
♦ The ROFTers group in El Paso, Texas is looking for new members. To join, contact Rene Nevarez: nevarez77@sbcglobal.net.
Stuart Atias would like to form a ROFTers group in the Mid-Suffolk area of Long Island. Contact him (satias1003@gmail.com), and become a founding member!
R. R. Reno is editor of First Things.
