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 November 3 for publication in the January issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.
A Genealogy of Suicide
I found Matthew Burdette’s analysis in “The Right to Be Killed” (August/September 2025) engaging. However, Burdette holds out societal acceptance as a key psychological driver for the euthanasia phenomenon. But while acceptance surely drove the “Pride” movement to its zenith, I don’t think it drives the “suicidee,” as the suicidee does not care for posterity.
In that vein, Burdette does not go far enough down the genealogy of this problem to its first precedent question: the red line of life-weariness, which has been held up by inspiringly varied thinkers. There is Nietzsche, who declared Socrates a distasteful decadent who evidenced a weariness to life on his deathbed. Then there is Camus, who clearly cast the fundamental question of philosophy as suicide. And more recently, there is the unlikely ally Michel Houellebecq, who has stated that the fight against euthanasia will be his life’s work. Perhaps he will channel the same fervor as The Map and the Territory protagonist Jed Martin, who delivers a cathartic blow to the horrifyingly flippant administrators of death he encounters all too late. To take Burdette a step further, or rather, a step back, the yes or no to life is the first thing par excellence: From abortions to euthanasia, they have all said no; it is those of us who have said yes that must show them how to stop saying no. The rest will follow from the first and be worked out in fear and trembling.
Tyler J. Wagner
dallas, texas
Exceptional How?
Liel Leibovitz presents a stirring vision of Judaism as it relates to the American project in “No Chosen, No ‘Almost Chosen’” (August/September 2025). The logic of anti-Semites, whose real aim is to denigrate America, is chilling: “Reject the original bearers of the covenant, and you negate the whole project.” In Leibovitz’s presentation, American Judaism emerges as a bulwark against America’s domestic and foreign enemies. It reminds me of President Trump telling voters that he bears the attacks of the left so ordinary folks don’t have to.
I have two concerns with the argument. First, shouldn’t we distinguish anti-Semitism from anti-Israel policy? Opposition to fighting for Israel need not entail hatred of Jews. Americans opposed to entering the World Wars need not have hated the British. Can one even laud the role of Jews in American life as “representatives of the foundational belief that America is a covenantal nation,” while opposing support of Israel?
This leads to my second concern: Leibovitz’s characterization of American exceptionalism today. He states that “most Americans” think America is a “great, godly, and exceptional nation.” Do they? I worry that the more common strain of American exceptionalism is materialistic and hollow: loud, proud, and ready to quit should the winds of success slacken. How many Americans are godly? How many godly Americans believe America is exceptional? How many of them believe so on the basis of divine favor? In my experience, American exceptionalism has less of a religious fervor than a sporting one. Those in agreement with Lincoln that America is an “almost chosen” nation ought to worry more.
Will James
san antonio, texas
Conversion Not Convergence
Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., offers five aims for twenty-first-century Catholic theology: confidence, opposition to much of secular liberalism, three approaches to Hindus and Muslims, defense of the arts and humanities, and an emphasis on the sacramental order and contemplative life (“The Future of Catholic Theology,” August/September 2025). White then briefly reverts to “myriad voices” (the modern-day Areopagus?). About these “living forms” we read that “their unity comes from above, as observed by Teilhard de Chardin in the statement that inspired Flannery O’Connor: ‘At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.’”
On the other hand, what does not rise does not converge. The self-understanding and germ of Islam is fitrah, the original orientation toward God prior to any religion, dictated in the uncreated Qur’an. Doesn’t this truncated version of inborn and universal natural law cancel the Judeo-Christian “anthropology” of original innocence together with original sin, the gratuitousness of grace, the historicity of the Incarnation, and the coherence of faith and reason?
White’s article might have concluded with the insight of an also perceptive Muslim. In 1965 (and after the Council), the lay observer Jean Guitton quoted the Muslim el Akkad (from 1956): “It all comes down to knowing whether one should hold strictly to the fundamental religious values which were those of Abraham and Moses, on pain of falling into blasphemy—as the Muslim[s] believe; or whether God has called men to approach him more closely, revealing to them little by little their fundamental condition as sinful men, and the forgiveness that transforms them and prepares them for the beatific vision—as Christian dogma teaches.”
The interreligious—and anthropological—connection to White’s perceptive article is not in ascendant “convergence” but in personal conversion.
Peter D. Beaulieu
shoreline, washington
In Proper Places
As one who has long observed the collapse of formal and final causes in our philosophical discourse into only material and efficient causes, I found Mary Harrington’s “The King and the Swarm” to be thought provoking and informative (August/September 2025). Is it any surprise that we have an identity crisis helixed together with a crisis of meaning? Identity demands a formal cause, just as purpose and meaning demand a final one.
I would question, however, Harrington’s assessment of Isaac Newton’s role in all this. She lumps him in with those who saw the universe as “no longer ordered from the top down by God’s ideas,” and supports this with his view that the stuff of reality emerges from “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles.” She goes on to say that Newton’s “conception of materiality” was one of “tiny, distinct, hard, particulate atoms orbiting one another.” She says of Newton’s view that “somehow—we know not how—” the units “agglomerat[e]” with larger units up the scale until they finally emerge in human life and thought. Newton, in her reading, appears as a prototypical Darwin, a cosmological Dawkins. This is now a very outdated understanding of Newton. Her otherwise wonderful reading is flawed.
First, Harrington seems to lump Newton in with the classical “Atomists” like Lucretius, Democritus, and Leucippus. But Newton was no atomist. He did refer to “corpuscles” in his Opticks, as the core of material reality, but not as the basis of reality itself—which was God and his will. These constantly underwrote all cosmological ontology and motion.
Second, Newton was not a “Newtonian” in the sense in which his work was co-opted later for other purposes during the so-called Enlightenment. What Newton believed in these matters can be summarized as follows: He was a committed Christian who helped found the Boyle Lectures, the distinct purpose of which was to refute Atheism and Deism, which he believed were grave dangers. He believed that God created the universe and that he constantly upheld it by his divine will. He was an anti-materialist.
Third, Newton’s understanding of God is fully compatible with both formal and final causality—indeed it requires it. In the “General Scholium” of his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Newton wrote, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. . . . This being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.” Could Aquinas have said it any better?
Thomas C. Pfizenmaier
poulsbo, washington
Bravo for Mary Harrington’s delightfully ambitious essay on the connections between the medium and the substance of human thought. She might, however, have highlighted two more effects of the printing press. Printing undercut the foundation of reason in custom and scripture (both sacred and profane). Religion and law no longer needed to rely so much on the deliberations of elders and clerics. Cut loose from any foundational source except will, legislation was empowered, that is, the radical idea that right can be changed to wrong (or vice versa) by the passing of a day or a border. Thus our democracy could be born: government by the will of the people.
Richard Stith
valparaiso, indiana
War of Words
Evelyn Waugh ends his wonderful novel Put Out More Flags by saying of one of his characters, “Poor booby, he was bang right.” Jaspreet Singh Boparai is very far from being a booby, but he is bang right in his characterization of both Waugh and his antagonist Trevor-Roper (“Waugh Against the Fogeys,” August/September 2025).
May I add a few words about Trevor-Roper’s hostility to the Church of Rome? The intensity of his suspicions of Catholicism, which Boparai finds almost paranoid, originate from the period of the Spanish Civil War. Trevor-Roper was an ardent supporter of the Republican government and a vehement foe of the fascistic Nationalists. He queued for hours, for example, to view Picasso’s Guernica when it was exhibited in England. The study of Spanish history was a crucial and enriching part of his intellectual development. Like the Hispanic scholar Peter Russell, who was expelled from Spain during the civil war, he loathed the bigotry, cruelty, superstition, and ignorance of the Spanish priesthood: Bruce Taylor’s splendid biography of Peter Russell, Scholar-Spy, explains the position clearly. Trevor-Roper even wrote to the historian A. L. Rowse, in 1951, that he sympathized with the Republican arsonists who destroyed churches—“a jacquerie against the outward symbols of a hated system.” His rage against Spanish militarists never abated. As head of a Cambridge college in the 1980s, it infuriated him that one of the fellows, my friend David Watkin, defiantly wore black armbands on the anniversary of Generalissimo Franco’s death.
Richard Davenport-Hines
all souls college
oxford, england
Boparai stings the heart with how close to home his portraits are (“But most prefer to daydream about ‘being a writer’” being an especially sharp dagger). However, it seems he saves the best and most profound point for the very last: Telling the truth in affairs both private and public is the defining characteristic of the non-Fogey. To be willing to suffer the consequences (and bear the responsibilities of the rewards) of truthfulness seems an apt description of Waugh himself—and of that to which we, too, are called—and I appreciate how deftly Boparai slips this in for those who reach the close.
Finally, the effect of this all on me is to finally pull Waugh’s biography of St. Edmund Campion from my bookshelf. Perhaps I can escape Fogeydom yet, but prayers are appreciated.
M. J. O’Connor
mexico city, mexico
Caliper Evangelists
Edmund G. Seebauer (“Engineers for the Gospel,” August/September 2025) takes up the very important and timely question of the relationship between religion and engineering, especially Christianity and engineering.
While science is often seen by humanists as being in opposition to religion and its truths, by Seebauer’s lights, engineering is more resonant. Why? There are two reasons. First, engineering is about doing, designing, and making—all of which are activities that build a “new creation.” When these activities are done in the spirit of caritas, they accord neatly with Christian “incarnational teleology,” and they lead to “transforming and redeeming nature,” thereby sacralizing the activities of the engineer. Second, the Christian worldview and that of engineering are compatible since both are grounded in objective truth. This is not just convenient; at present it is urgent, as the author points out. The West has not just drifted, but more recently raced, toward a new worldview that is not based on the objective and universal, toward one that prioritizes the subjective and the particular. In this philosophy, we each have our own “lived experience,” from which we derive our own truth. This leads to a rejection of Western science and to embracing “various forms of de facto Gnosticism driven by emotivism and based on racial, gender, and environmental concerns.” With the rejection of science and objective truth will come the decline of engineering, and, worse, civilizational progress will cease.
Hence, his core message is that this is the time for engineers who believe to become evangelists for truth and for the continuity of Western civilization. The time is nigh for thinking much more deeply about the relationship between engineering and religion.
Henry C. Foley
manhasset, new york
I wish to commend Edmund G. Seebauer for his recent article. In an intellectual climate marked by various forms of Kantian constructivism, in which facts are reduced to culturally conditioned categories, his insistence upon metaphysical realism and thus the mind’s genuine capacity to know objective reality is both refreshing and urgently needed. Engineers, perhaps more than any other profession, daily confront the consequences of neglecting this truth: When systems fail, reality resists our abstractions. Seebauer rightly reminds us that engineering, if it is to remain trustworthy, must be grounded in this objectivity and rigor—aptly illustrated when he quotes an engineering undergraduate student who responded to a survey on transgenderism by stating, “There are two genders, male and female. If an engineer creates a bolt and a nut but then whimsically labels them, then he’s not that great an engineer.”
Equally valuable is his recognition that the gospel offers not only compatibility with engineering but a worldview uniquely conducive to its flourishing. By situating technical work within the broader horizon of Christian revelation, he shows how faith provides an intellectual and moral framework supportive of sound theory and responsible praxis. It was fitting that Seebauer invoked the work of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, OSB, the great historian and philosopher of science and Templeton Prize laureate, who served on the physics faculty for more than forty years at my own institution. The gospel does not weaken engineering’s rigor but strengthens it, supplying a vision of truth, order, and human flourishing that no secular philosophy has managed to sustain.
Seebauer’s reflections deserve wide readership, and I hope they spark a deeper conversation on how faith and engineering can together serve the common good. For example, Catholic Social Teaching, with its emphasis on human dignity, can be fruitfully deployed in guiding ethical reflection on artificial intelligence, ensuring that emerging technologies serve people rather than subjugating them.
Rev. Joseph R. Laracy
seton hall university
south orange, new jersey
The WFB Dialectic
“The Great Excommunicator” (August/September 2025), Christopher Caldwell’s review of Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley Jr., skillfully dissects Buckley’s intricate legacy. The depth of this bequest, however, lies not only in its complexity but also in its revelation of the inherent dialectic of conservatism. Caldwell presents Buckley not as a simple founder, but as a figure of paradox: an elitist defender of “civilization” who purged extremists to broaden the movement, yet whose early defenses of segregation and opposition to civil rights now cast a shadow over the movement. This tension between intellectual refinement and populist undercurrents mirrors the broader conservative fractures, as Buckley’s unwritten Revolt Against the Masses clashed with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which favored suburban and working-class voters over patrician ideals.
Tanenhaus enriches this with Buckley family lore—his father’s isolationist oil ventures and Southern ties. This family history challenges simplistic views of Buckley’s heritage, adding depth and richness to our understanding of him. Yet the biography’s truncation post-Reagan leaves underexplored how Buckley navigated the post-Cold War rifts, such as the expulsion of paleoconservatives amid rising populism.
Ultimately, Caldwell’s review shines a light on the dialectical essence of conservatism: In progressive societies, rhetorical traditionalism surges to counter actual change, fostering internal purges and intellectual incentives that reward conformity over truth. Buckley’s role as the “Great Excommunicator”—banishing cranks like Robert Welch while courting “wishy-washy” moderates—ensured growth but sowed divisions between elitism and populism. Today, in a polarized landscape echoing the Trump-era schisms, this resonates profoundly: Who now polices the boundaries of conservatism? Caldwell’s review urges a deep and urgent introspection, compelling conservatives to grapple with their founder’s elitist contradictions against the movement’s democratic impulses, lest it fracture further.
Christopher Fennell
milledgeville, georgia
