R. R. Reno

♦ 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 »

We often hear that conservatism comes from a sober recognition of limits—getting mugged by reality. We are fallible, fallen creatures, and the conservative learns to doubt the efficacy of the grand schemes of progressivism, efforts of social transformation that often require the power of . . . . Continue Reading »

♦ Boys and girls are different. There, I’ve said it, a heresy of our time. We’re not supposed to suggest that a woman shouldn’t fight in combat, or that an athletic girl doesn’t have a right to play on the boys’ football team—or that a young woman doesn’t run a greater risk than a . . . . Continue Reading »

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Thank you for being a part of our fall 2016 fundraising campaign! Continue Reading »