Letters

We welcome letters to the­ editor. Letters appear two issues after the article to which they are responding. Letters under three hundred words are preferred, and they may be edited for length and clarity.

Letters responding to ­articles published in this issue should be received by April 3 for publication in the June/July issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.

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Reprogrammed by AI

I appreciate Liel Leibovitz’s wanting to look at the light regarding artificial intelligence (“AI as Liberation,” February 2026). However, it would only be wise to think of AI in terms of how its inventors portray it if they had earned our trust. So far, the hallmarks of AI’s creation have been deception and addiction. Those who control the reins of this beast are not honest, and the nearly unimaginable fact of AI is its essentially infinite potential to subvert mankind. AI is owned by mammon. It does not know love. Not at all.

Our winsome AI god promises to provide a box to sleep in after a fun and relaxing day of surfing the carefully scheduled and programmed addictive content that will reinforce whatever designs the owner intrigues. The problem is that AI changes our consciousness. As a high school English teacher, I can attest that the recent advent of AI immediately changed the minds of our youth—they cannot think in the classical operative mode—their exposure to AI, unsurprisingly, has programmed them to calculate. The concept of meaning does not perplex them. The paradox of meaningless meaning makes a bad kernel. They are uninterested in and unable to read long texts.

But of course, the Word is a long text and its holy meaning is exceedingly rich and complex. My students who believe want to talk to me about the videos AI has introduced to them. They are never about ­Jesus, rather they are about the edges of intrigue, the false prophets. The Lord set us free to obey the Second Covenant. AI will make us ­obedient to a man named Elon or Sam or Peter. They each have a vision for mankind, and some of them may even have inklings of faith. I doubt any of them are prophets, guiding Christian believers closer to the Lord. But since they can control the consciousness, and thereby the faith, of mankind, they must either be prophets or the Antichrist.

Doug Staton
alton, missouri

Leibovitz offers the pleasant prospect of men without work turning to God. The Englishman Thomas Carlyle, writing two hundred years ago about a disorderly monastery centuries earlier, tells how it was restored to order: “The only absolute command is Work—faithful, exact, productive performance. Everything good flows from this center, which is the justification for man’s life and way of guarding his soul from evil.” The well-known proverb reminds us, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

Jim Severance
spring green, wisconsin

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God’s Veto

In her essay on Reginald Pole’s Reformation-era battles to bridge the great divides of Christendom (“The Lonely Passion of Reginald Pole,” February 2026), Patricia Snow suggests that Christians might read the failure of England’s Catholic almost-­restoration—in which Pole and the childless Queen Mary both entered eternity on the same day, enabling the Elizabethan settlement that ­followed—as a providential judgment on the persecutions and burnings that Pole supported, a divine veto imposed on the attempt to restore the unity of Christendom by force.

Allowing for my natural partiality here (Snow is my mother), I would suggest that subsequent events in English religious history tend toward the same implication. The seeming thumb on the scale against Catholic and philo-papist efforts was a recurring phenomenon: The “Protestant wind” that doomed the Spanish Armada is the famous example, but studying the history of the Stuarts and (especially) the Jacobites you will find an extraordinary record of ill luck, mischance, and often just bad weather dooming efforts that might otherwise have been expected to meet with more success. In the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the sixteenth, it was as though divine favor were consistently withheld from the cause of Catholic restoration.

We are still a long way from such a restoration now. But with Catholic religious participation lately eclipsing Anglican church attendance under a king bearing a Stuart first name, perhaps we might wonder if God’s veto has finally been ­removed.

Ross Douthat
new haven, connecticut

I enjoyed Patricia Snow’s thoughtful historical analysis of Reginald Pole’s passion for a ­united Church. The focus was on the earthly Christendom and, as Snow astutely points out, no individual in Christendom has maintained or mended this union. Pole’s passion for union and his spiritual beliefs are revealed to the reader against Henry VIII’s manipulation and intrigue for personal gain, as well as Queen Mary’s equally tainted bloody regime of martyrdom—all done in the name of God and the earthly Christendom. Since the Emperor Constantine, the earthly Christendom of brick and mortar, administration, and organizational structure has been tainted by man’s sinful nature.

This Christendom is only temporal and very different from ­Christianity. The earthly schism is bridged by Christ alone. For in Christ alone there is spiritual union among the fellowship of believers (the Communion of Saints). Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Union begins as a believer in Christ. Love must be the mark of being a Christian (John 13:34–35).

St. Augustine and Reformation leaders have, in turns, been attributed with these words: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.” If there is to be union among the earthly physical Christendom, among the branches and denominations, we should seek to live out our Christian calling of love. This is where unity begins.

Rich Vroegindewey
stow, massachusetts

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Gay Rights and Wrongs

In his history of the paradoxical movement to normalize queerness (“The Rise and Fall of Gay Activism,” February 2026), Scott Yenor writes: “During the same-sex marriage debate, it was taken as self-evident that the first side to talk about sodomy loses. The left knew it had to hide reality; the right feared looking intolerant.” And hypocritical, I would add. A society that countenances heterosexual contraception cannot logically condemn homosexual acts. Although the former involves sexual complementarity (read: ­normal) while the latter does not (read: queer), both practices are inherently sterile. It may be true, as Yenor claims, that both the left and the right strategically “stuck to abstract notions of rights, dignity, and the proper definition of marriage,” but it is precisely what both sides ­deliberately avoided discussing that grounds the controversy over what marriage is. It seems to me that both sides hid reality.

Rev. Thomas Kocik
bonita springs, florida

Scott Yenor’s article is timely and bold, and an excellent conversation starter. However, I worry that it will add fuel to a dangerous friend/enemy mentality. I think moral critiques should begin with and inspire self-reflection. In light of this, the article’s message that gay activists (and gay and transgender people in general) have a long-term goal of overturning the moral order with public obscenity, hedonism, and sexual violence needs to be contextualized and nuanced.

Based on my relationships with queer people, I believe that some LGBTQ-identifying people who were not around during the first wave have genuinely bought into the second wave’s goal of integration into the norm and are not knowingly pushing a secret, hedonistic agenda. This is evident in the debates around queer literature in schools. While some activists do advocate sexual and gender-related experimentation among children, others seem to want nothing more than for their communities to believe that their orientations do not undermine their human dignity and worth—a desire that merits compassion. All people are image-bearers of God.

Additionally, when naming the excesses of any movement, it is important to guard closely against hypocrisy. The same vices that Yenor decries among gay activists (love of spectacle, license, and abusive acts) seem to be gaining ground on the right. Cruelty and spectacle are trademarks of groups like the Groypers, and shock value is a powerful currency in other conservative spaces, as evidenced by the recent Politico exposé of a Young Republicans’ text chain. The issue must run deeper, since it is not exclusive to the LGBTQ community. I hope readers take Yenor’s article as an opportunity to consider moral dysregulation in our culture more broadly, and the desires that drive it.

Karissa Horn
greenville, south carolina

During the New York City hepatitis and HIV/AIDS epidemics in the 1980s and ’90s, one of my business associates observed that rampant, promiscuous homosexuality might be a problem that would solve itself, meaning that anal intercourse and other intimate conduct involving bodily fluid transfers would produce homosexual extinction over a generation. About that time, we began to observe the efforts of homosexuals to reproduce themselves via the genetic manipulation of sperm cells, surrogacy, adoption, and grooming. The hinge question, on which both social tolerance or rejection of homosexuality swings, is whether this conduct is inborn or acquired, nature or nurture. Neither the completion of the revolution Scott Yenor so well describes nor the counterrevolution he guardedly posits will happen without an answer to this question. Yenor’s views on this issue would be welcome. 

Edward Cerny, 
beaverkill, new york

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America’s Memorial Box

I wish to congratulate Spencer Klavan for his essay “In the Footsteps of Aeneas” (February 2026). If only there were more classicists who could wear their learning as lightly as he does, or reveal the depths and richness of The Aeneid so succinctly. Of course, I quibble with certain elements in his translations of ­Virgil’s poetry, but no two Latinists will ­ever produce quite the same English renditions of these lines (unless they are cheating). Some readers might not realize how difficult it is to bring across even half of the meaning of the best classical Latin verse in a modern language. The result is inevitably as personal and idiosyncratic as one’s own reading of the text. 

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statue ­Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius carries a great deal of meaning for Klavan, and has influenced his reading of The Aeneid, which is why I want to ask him about a detail that is not mentioned in his essay. This is not the merriest sculpture, as he points out. Aeneas looks exhausted by his various burdens, spiritual and otherwise, while his young son Ascanius has the unhappy look of a young child being dragged by his parents through the Villa Borghese during a holiday in Rome. As for grandfather Anchises, he looks utterly miserable, even if he seems to be the most alert of the three—he is the only one without his feet on the ground. Aeneas carries him over one shoulder, partly for various artistic and technical reasons, mainly because it would be unseemly for his son to give him a piggyback ride, at least within the conventions of this sort of sculpture. But there is also a compositional aspect to his unusual position.

Anchises is holding a container with his ancestors’ ashes, on the lid of which are two statues of household gods. The whole thing rests on top of Aeneas’s head—no wonder he seems under such strain. Klavan might disagree, but I suspect this heavy object might be the real focal point of the sculpture. The counterargument to my claim is the obvious observation that nine out of ten viewers ignore it. 

Readers should look for photographs of the sculpture to examine the container, which is worthy of study in its own right, not merely as a curiosity, or demonstration of the artist’s skill, but for its symbolic importance. At the end of his essay, Klavan rightly mentions the famous shield of Aeneas from Book VIII of The Aeneid. A little earlier he makes the provocative (but surely convincing) claim that “America is now in a position rather like Aeneas’s at the start of Virgil’s poem.” If this is true—and I think I am convinced that it is—then what does he make of the “memorial box” in Anchises’s hand (and on Aeneas’s head)? Might this have any symbolic importance with respect to America’s current position, or should we pass it by just as tourists in Rome always do?

Jaspreet Singh Boparai
london, england

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Repealing Evolution

In “True Humans” (February 2026), Stephen M. Barr notes without guile that Daniel Kuebler “discusses the order in the properties of atoms, reflected in the Periodic Table, which allows them readily and spontaneously to form amino acids and the other building blocks of life.” He assures us that atoms “readily and spontaneously” form life’s building blocks, as if hydrogen and carbon were simply waiting backstage for their cue, eager to arrange themselves into the architecture of existence. One is reminded of the old doctrine of spontaneous generation: that mice spring forth from dirty rags and maggots from rotting meat. We have progressed, it seems, only in the respectability of our superstitions.

The word spontaneous does considerable work while appearing to do none at all. In the chemist’s lexicon, it means merely “thermodynamically possible under certain conditions”—rather like saying it is thermodynamically possible for me to arrive spontaneously in Dawson City, provided someone builds a complex network of roads, supplies an appropriate vehicle and fuel depots along the way, and points me in the right direction. The Periodic Table no more “allows” atoms to readily form amino acids than the existence of marble “allows” it to readily form the Pietà!

What is one truly able to state about such building blocks? That, when scientists carefully select in and out (after innumerable iterations) ingredients, maintain precise conditions in billion-dollar laboratories, apply deliberately calibrated energy through million-dollar machines, and actively intervene to prevent degradation of products, they can produce some of life’s building blocks. This is rather like demonstrating that Thanksgiving dinner is spontaneous because turkeys and cranberries and green beans (with dried onions and cream of mushroom soup) exist in nature. These scientific experiments begin with the outcome, life, and work backward, asking, “What conditions might produce this?” Then, having intentionally engineered and re-engineered those conditions, they announce they have discovered spontaneity.

But here is the deeper mischief: the subtle resurrection of teleology under materialist auspices. When you say the Periodic Table’s order “allows” life to form “readily,” you smuggle purpose and design back into nature through the servants’ entrance. The old natural law—­intelligible, purposive, ordered toward ends—has been dismissed as medieval superstition. Yet we are asked to believe in a new natural law that just happens to arrange itself conveniently and spontaneously toward the production of life, with no mind behind it, no purpose within it, merely an astonishing sequence of happy accidents that look remarkably like design.

Christians should be skeptical of this sort of thing, not because we fear science, but because we recognize question-begging when we see it. The assertion that life’s building blocks form “readily and spontaneously” from atomic properties is not a scientific statement, much less an empirical discovery, but a philosophical commitment dressed in laboratory clothing. The honest scientist would say: “Given highly specific, that is, contrived conditions that we hypothesize might have existed, and which we can, with nearly unlimited budgets and control, create in laboratories, certain organic molecules might form.” This is interesting. It is even important. But it is a far cry from claiming that matter spontaneously yearns toward life.

William Dillingham
beulah, north dakota

There are major problems with Stephen Barr’s discussion of evolution. First, he does not make the crucial distinction between evolution and Darwinism. The idea of evolution has been around since the ancient Greeks. The French zoologist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon hypothesized evolution a century before On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s grandfather, ­Erasmus Darwin, was an ardent evolutionist. Charles Darwin’s epochal contribution was to provide a seemingly plausible explanation of how ­evolution occurred, one that was purely mechanistic and dispensed with God. This was his idea of natural selection gradually producing new species.

If Darwin’s theory is correct, the fossil record should show innumerable slight gradations between earlier species and later ones. Darwin was aware, however, that the fossil record of his day showed nothing of the sort. There were considerable discontinuities between major animal groups. He accordingly entitled his chapter on the subject, “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record.” Enormous quantities of fossils have been dug up since, and, if anything, they make more glaring the gaps that troubled Darwin. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard called this lack of gradual change in the fossil record the “trade secret” of modern paleontology.

The fossil record shows exactly what it showed in Darwin’s day: Species appear suddenly in a fully developed state and change little if at all before disappearing. (Ninety-­nine out of a hundred species are extinct.) About five hundred million years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian era, there was an explosion of complex life forms—mollusks, jellyfish, trilobites—for which not a single ancestral form can be found in earlier rocks. A man from Mars looking at the subsequent fossil record would say that species are replaced by other species, rather than evolving into them. And Darwin’s theory collapses entirely once it is accepted that minute gradual changes simply do not account for the emergence of a new species. If natural selection were the mechanism for major changes in species, then every intermediate form has to be useful to the organism. But, as scientists like Richard Golschmidt point out, it is impossible even to imagine how, for example, the poison apparatus of a snake could have evolved on a minute step-by-step basis. Another example: Blood clotting involves a complex chain of chemical events; remove just one step and it doesn’t work, so how exactly did it evolve? We do not know.

George Sim Johnston
new york, new york

The choice of Stephen Barr to review three new books on the Christian/Catholic view of evolution was most appropriate since he, more than any other scientist of our generation, has articulately enlightened the world on the reasonableness of theistic evolution and the detrimental inadequacies of the self-styled intelligent design movement—which has failed to sufficiently distance itself from the anti-intellectual position of young earth creationism.

Theistic evolution, the position that God, when creating the universe, imbued it with intrinsically meaningful and purposeful secondary causation such that its potentialities could spontaneously emerge over time, is not only reasonable but demonstrable of God’s elegance and goodness, since his providence always encourages and requires the cooperation of all his creatures. This understanding has not only been supported by St. John Henry Newman but also by St. ­Augustine and by Étienne Gilson’s interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas. Just as a plant’s seed is intrinsically designed to spontaneously grow and flower in a few months, so the seed of the universe was predesigned by God to flower with life in a few billion years.

It is unfortunate, however, that the Church has not forcefully affirmed the clear philosophical/theological truth that the bodies of our first parents had to be immediately created with their souls. Because the soul is the form of the body, and since a soul with rational powers requires a body with posture and hands and brain that facilitates such powers, and yet such a body would have been a burden to survival without such powers, and since a purely physical mechanism such as evolution cannot anticipate the sudden appearance of such a spiritually rational soul, then the bodies of Adam and Eve must have also been created de novo at the time of their appearance.

Douglas P. Miller
vale, north carolina

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The Law Unbound

I want to thank Matthew Schmitz for his review of Daniel Williams’s book on Roe v. Wade (“The Theology of Roe,” February 2026). But I would like to clarify the breadth of the ruling, which is often misrepresented—even the New York Times and Associated Press reported the day after the decision that it legalized abortion in “the first 3 months.” Effectively it did so for the nine months of pregnancy.

In the second trimester, says Schmitz’s review, states could regulate abortion “in ways consistent with maternal health.” To be clear, the Supreme Court’s standard was that a regulation must serve the mother’s health to be valid, the unborn child’s interests remaining irrelevant. And after viability, when the child, if delivered, could survive outside the mother’s body, abortion must be allowed if the practitioner says it will serve the mother’s life “or health.” Roe’s companion decision, Doe v. Bolton, then defined “health” in this context to encompass “all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age—relevant to the well-being of the patient.” And Roe said these two decisions, issued the same day, “are to be read together.” As law professor John T. Noonan Jr. wrote in A Private Choice (1979), even in the final weeks the woman simply had to “find an abortionist who believed she needed an abortion.” The Court overrode all fifty states’ abortion laws, as even the most permissive restricted late-term abortions. It also overrode medical practice itself: When the Court acted in 1973, the terminology manual of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defined an induced abortion as “the deliberate interruption of pregnancy by any means before the 20th completed week of gestation.” I do not think any Protestant group had proposed the breathtaking extremism of Roe.

Richard M. Doerflinger
linthicum heights, maryland

In Matthew Schmitz’s fine article on the theology of Roe, ­Anthony Kennedy’s use of the phrase “basic dignity” as a crucial concept is noted. The word dignity is vague; it has many shades of meaning, and a gentle flavor of upscale appearance and a nose in the air. It’s not a great word to describe the traits of humans that make us unique among the animals.

I’ve tried to think of a single word that encompasses our intelligence and our instinct for good. The best one I can come up with is virtue. I’d like to add purpose to the thought: Valor comes to mind. But that’s two words, and maybe both of them are needed. Perhaps your readers—or Schmitz—can come up with a better word.

Joe Kerwin
walnut creek, connecticut