R. R. Reno

This summer will see two fine opportunities for anyone interested in the riches of the Catholic tradition. The first—a philosophy workshop on Thomas Aquinas and contemporary philosophy—will take place in late June (23rd through 26th) at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York. . . . . Continue Reading »

As readers will have seen, the Board of the Institute on Religion and Public life has appointed me the next editor of First Things. I’ll be working under Jim Neuchterlein over the next couple of months, trying to soak up as much of his editorial wisdom as possible before taking over on April 1st. These new responsibilities mean that this will be my last Thursday column… . Continue Reading »

Yesterday I wrote my Thursday column about the ways in which authority contributes to both natural and supernatural human flourishing. A friend wrote me to protest that, while he certainly agreed about the positive role of authority in political life, my examples of those who wrongly imagine we can . . . . Continue Reading »

Drawing on The National Marriage Project’s 2010 Report, ” When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America ,” I’ve mused a little about divorce and the larger relations between changed social mores and increased inequalities in America, suggesting that the sexual revolution . . . . Continue Reading »

A recently released report prepared by The National Marriage Project under the direction of W. Bradford Wilcox is full of very interesting data about sex, marriage, and family life in contemporary America, some of which we’ll be ventilating in a forthcoming issue of First Things . One . . . . Continue Reading »

“We need authority to be ourselves.” So writes Victor Lee Austin in Up With Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings. Yes, that’s quite right, but there’s a further truth as well. We need authority so that we can become more than ourselves. Aside from the occasional anarchist, most acknowledge the need for some form of authority to block the worst excesses of sin… . Continue Reading »

Against our critical age and its masters of suspicion: It is more precious to love than to know. . . . . Continue Reading »

There’s been a great deal of commentary about the attempted assassination of Congresswaman Gabrielle Giffords and the deadly rampage that followed, with some eager to pin blame on pugnacious conservative rhetoric, and others denying the link. At The New Republic David Rieff offers a sharply . . . . Continue Reading »

Last week I reflected on the genius of Solzhenitsyn’s great novel, In the First Circle . Some readers weighed in on other aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s thought, especially his famous Harvard Address, given in 1978, four years after arriving in the United States as an exile from Russia. The . . . . Continue Reading »

As is often the case, Public Discourse has an interesting article today, this one by Matthew Milliner on the current hand-wringing about the future of humanistic inquiry in American higher education. Milliner, a graduate student in art history at Princeton and a blogger here at First Thoughts, . . . . Continue Reading »