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Limits of Pen and Tongue
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 103 laments the limits of language to capture the thing it describes. “Look in your…
How to Mark the Death of a Devil?
“What pleasure should I find in the death of a sinner, the Lord God says, when he…
The Travails of Lieutenant Marty
One of the standard techniques in political propaganda, left and right, is to present ideas or events…
A House by and for Nations
After David sinfully takes a census of Israel (1 Chronicles 21), the threshing site where he builds…
Love Well What You Leave
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 embodies the excessiveness of poetry. It’s possible to summarize the poem in a brief…
Solidarity and Dynamism
White Eagle, Black Madonna: One Thousand Years of the Polish Catholic Traditionby robert e. alvisfordham university press,…
Womb or Tomb
Like many Renaissance writers, Shakespeare is obsessed with mutability, with the vaporous quality of human life. Nothing…
Justification and Joy
In Ecclesiastes 9, Solomon urges, “Go, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a…
Putin, the Pope and Steve Bannon
Buzzfeed has posted a transcript of a 2014 talk that Trump strategist Steve Bannon gave to a…
Venice in Threes
For years, I’ve highlighted the triple structure of Merchant of Venice: Three romances, three plots (casket, bond,…
Every Campus Has a Safe Space Already
With the election of Donald Trump, the cry for safe spaces has intensified. Conservative speaker Ben Shapiro…
Poetry and Popery
On this episode of the First Things Podcast: 1:34 Poetry, we are told, has gone viral on…
Reply to Carl Trueman
Carl Trueman’s review of The End of Protestantism was published in the December 2016 issue of First…
What We’ve Been Reading—11.18.16
Alexi Sargeant: On my honeymoon in Venice and Rome, I read Crosstalk, the latest novel from scintillating…
Is the Religious Right Dead or Alive?
Before November 8, numerous voices suggested that the Religious Right was in its death throes and that…
