Arts & Letters
A selection of recent articles on this topic
Terrarium
Look, here is grief,Her humid circuit riding, And here is God,Abiding. And here warm graceRuns down the lichen’s…
Hard Stop
So gradually, it seemed, the wayThings pass: the ice cube in the glassDisappears in a pool of…
Long Days
To my brother John. What happened to long days,the ones whose ends we couldn’tfathom till they came,and…
Caravaggio’s “Conversion of St. Paul”
(in the Cerasi Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo) Paul lies sprawled beneath his…
Might Does Not Always Make Right, or Even Sense
The “Melian Dialogue,” from Thucydides’s classic History of the Peloponnesian War, is the foundational text of the realist…
How Bad Bunny Mogged George Bush
On Sunday night, Americans had two options for the Super Bowl halftime show. The official NFL show…
The Protestant Mind
The following is an excerpt from the first edition of The Protestant Mind, a newsletter from First Things. We invite…
Noble Rituals
What are rituals? Rituals are not just routines. Mere routines are pragmatic and instrumental. Rituals transcend routines…
Uncovering the Real Melania
Melania, Brett Ratner’s documentary following the first lady of 2017–2020 around as she gets ready to become…
The Ones Who Didn’t Convert
Melanie McDonagh’s Converts, reviewed in First Things last month, allows us to gaze close-up at the extraordinary…
The Burning World of William Blake (ft. Mark Vernon)
In the latest installment of the ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein, Mark Vernon joins…
Bladee’s Redemptive Rap
Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, better known by his pen name Novalis, died at the age of…
Visions of Hell
A first proposition: High-quality film video lowers the cost of horror to zero. The horror of the…
The Fanfiction Reckoning (ft. Veronica Clarke)
First Things is proud to introduce a new podcast series. Secret Third Thing is a show about…
In the Footsteps of Aeneas
Gian Lorenzo Bernini had only just turned twenty when he finished his sculpture of Aeneas, the mythical…
