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Our Year in Film & Television—2025
First Things editors and writers share the most memorable films and TV shows they watched this year.…
Religious Freedom Is the Soul of American Security
In the quiet sanctuary of West Point’s Old Cadet Chapel, a striking mural crowns the apse above…
Our Year in Books—2025
First Things editors and writers share the most memorable books they read this year.
Wassailing at Christmas
Every year on January 17, revelers gather in an orchard near the Butcher’s Arms in the Somerset…
Rome and the Church in the United States
Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore, who confirmed my father, was a pugnacious Irishman with a taste…
Marriage Annulment and False Mercy
Pope Leo XIV recently told participants in a juridical-pastoral formation course of the Roman Rota that the…
Undercover in Canada’s Lawless Abortion Industry
On November 27, 2023, thirty-six-year-old Alissa Golob walked through the doors of the Cabbagetown Women’s Clinic in…
The Return of Blasphemy Laws?
Over my many years in the U.S., I have resisted the temptation to buy into the catastrophism…
The Fourth Watch
The following is an excerpt from the first edition of The Fourth Watch, a newsletter about Catholicism from First…
St. Cuthbert and the Cave That Couldn’t Be Filmed
August 2025 in northern England was chilly and windy. I had gone over to this land along…
Ukraine’s Religious Leaders and Munich 2.0
Prior to the “Revolution of Dignity” that began on the Maidan, Kyiv’s Independence Square, in late 2013…
Introducing The Fourth Watch: A Newsletter about Catholicism
When First Things began thirty-five years ago, our founder, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, was not yet Catholic.…
The Classroom Heals the Wounds of Generations
“Hope,” wrote the German-American polymath Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “is the deity of youth.” Wholly dependent on adults, children…
The End of the Fifth Republic
To paraphrase Antoine de Rivarol, the royalist pamphleteer who said that France was an absolute monarchy tempered…
Still Life, Still Sacred
Renaissance painters would use life-sized wooden dolls called manichini to study how drapery folds on the human…
