R. R. Reno

There’s something very right about Rod Dreher’s call to action in The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. He urges us to ask if we have “compromised too much with the world” and suggests ways to renew the integrity of our religious communities. Yet . . . . Continue Reading »

A young writer in Australia recently sent me an essay that ended with an arresting sentence: “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century.” I sympathize. We have reached a series of dead ends in the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans . . . . Continue Reading »

Injustices are done; imprudent, ill-considered policies are pursued. Brutal, cynical men posture as noble leaders. There’s a great deal about public life that arouses our passions. It is easy to become angry, bitter, fearful, and despairing. There’s another side as well. We can harbor great . . . . Continue Reading »

♦ Michael Novak died in February. He was a pillar of First Things for more than two decades. Like our founder, Richard John Neuhaus, Michael had been an ardent proponent of a number of progressive causes. Some of his early books about post–Vatican II Catholicism can make you blush. But in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Our public life is the better for his many decades of analysis, commentary, and spirited partisanship on behalf of higher religious, moral, and political truths. Continue Reading »

When we pledge our faithfulness to another on our wedding day, we’re mocking the changeableness of life, saying that we trust in the covenant of marriage to transcend the weakness of our flesh, the fickleness of our passions, and the fragility of our egos. Continue Reading »

Russia has annexed part of Crimea, has usurped America’s role as arbiter of winners and losers in the Middle East, and makes trouble in Ukraine. Putin is increasingly popular as the patron of anti-E.U. populism in Europe, and Moscow tried to influence the recent American presidential election. . . . . Continue Reading »

♦ “The modern economy privileges the well-educated and highly-skilled while giving them an excuse to denigrate people at the bottom (both white and non-white) as lazy, untalented, uneducated, and unsophisticated,” writes Victor Tan Chen in The Atlantic (“The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern . . . . Continue Reading »

We live in a dissolving age. Institutions, social forms, and traditional authorities recede. To the extent that they endure, they do so under the sign of choice, often reconfigured as economic or therapeutic projects. Man the entrepreneur and consumer is ascendant—or man the wounded, the victim of . . . . Continue Reading »

A preview of The Public Square, forthcoming in the March issue of First Things.There is an understanding of liberal pluralism that is compatible with Islam. Sherman Jackson, a black American Muslim, argued the case well. Continue Reading »