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 December 3 for publication in the February issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.
Useful Innards
I regret that Aaron Kheriaty’s very good analysis of the desiccated landscape of bioethics (“Zombie Bioethics,” October 2025) brought to my mind a very bad show, the animated sci-fi series Rick and Morty. In one episode, family spaghetti night is ruined when Morty discovers that Rick’s out-of-this-world pasta originates from the internal organs of human-like aliens that change form when they commit suicide. The aliens, once they become aware of their unique physiology, immediately begin marketing themselves to the galaxy. Despite pasta strainers set under bridges and billboards recommending MAiD, demand quickly outstrips supply and—under duress—the planet’s leaders seek alternatives. They settle on headless, single-limbed, humanoid clones with the sole instinct to stab themselves immediately upon generation to meet the requirement for suicide and sate the galaxy’s hunger.
The spaghetti fever is eventually broken when everyone is reminded that the pasta is actually people with complex and full lives. In the epilogue, we see the newly instituted family Salisbury steak night. The episode, which I don’t really recommend to anyone, illustrates the likely trajectory of any modern bioethical debates where the victims are invisible and the benefits are tangible. Once the palpable upsides of organ donation by default or in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic testing are institutionalized, most people will violently prefer ignorance to difficult truths about moral costs. Kheriaty rightly criticizes MIT moral zombies, but I wonder if the underlying infection is already too widespread to contain.
Brevin Anderson
alexandria, virginia
Transhumanism seems to be a recent concern in the minds of many thinkers, and for good reason. Aaron Kheriaty in “Zombie Bioethics” and R. R. Reno in “Eugenics Under the Flag of Choice” (October 2025) are among the most recent examples of authors demonstrating where anti-human ideologies such as transhumanism lead. The “artificial wombs” (exogenesis) briefly mentioned by Kheriaty will no doubt be sold as the solution to dwindling populations, leading to the designer babies of Reno’s piece becoming practically mandatory for those who participate. However, the average person is likely unaware such technologies or machinations are even around the corner.
We must consider going on the attack. In addition to petitions for reforms within bioethics and a return to God’s design, we need to change what people first associate with these technologies. Why not start lauding exogenesis now as the solution to abortion? Many arguments for eliminating an unborn human life are nullified when the mother needs neither to be pregnant nor present for the child to be born. It might hasten the adoption of these technologies and leave future generations with the consequences—dire ones at that—but it would remove primary rationales for filicide. Wouldn’t it be better to eliminate our giants and equip our children to fight their own than to bury our heads and make them fight both?
David Westmark
tallahassee, florida
Thinking in Boxes
Reading “B. F. Skinner Is Back” by Nikolas Prassas (October 2025) brought back unpleasant memories. When I was a first-year college student in 1967, an introductory course in psychology was required. It was a semester-long indoctrination in behaviorism according to B. F. Skinner. Because of lifelong church attendance and methodical Bible study, my mind rebelled against this inhuman, mechanical concept. I asked the professor, a convinced behaviorist, if there was anything in human nature aside from stimulus and response. He said there was not. I asked about consciousness, free will, morality, and natural law, all of which he termed “illusion, nonsense, unscientific.”
A few years later I read Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), which reinforced my initial impression. Skinner rejected the historic basis of our criminal justice system and believed moral blame for criminals was unscientific and unwarranted. Criminal punishment was “negative reinforcement” that was erratic and ineffective in altering behavior. He rejected the idea of punishment as retribution and proposed “behavior modification” as the only “scientific” way to deal with criminals.
Many years later I taught a university course in ethics, and we took up Skinner’s ideas. Lengthy discussion led to the obvious conclusion: Behaviorism is a powerful idea that explains only the lowest moral level of human behavior. It rejects the idea of behavior guided by moral reasoning. It disregards free will, moral sentiment, accountability, and any metaphysical aspect of human nature.
If Nikolas Prassas is right that Skinner-type behaviorism underlies artificial intelligence, our society has much to fear. If an AI chatbot can fool us into thinking it is human, then what matters most in the education of our youth, that is, the development of conscience and moral reasoning, would be lost, and all ethics in our world would be at risk.
Kevin M. Moore
onondaga community college
syracuse, new york
Thanks to Nikolas Prassas for his insightful analysis of the threat to our humanity posed by AI. But Prassas concedes too much to AI, I think, when he suggests that the “startling effectiveness of LLMs at generating novel and coherent sentences” means that the language barrier has now been broken mechanistically.
As Prassas notes, large language models (LLMs) recombine already given coherent language fragments into something new by means of a deterministic probability algorithm. The novelty and coherence are directly dependent on human intelligence—all the coherent sentences already on the internet and the LLM algorithms furnished by the AI engineers. But what René Descartes presumably had in mind when he said that language cannot be produced mechanistically is a machine coming up with coherent sentences on its own, like a child does. The mark of genuine creativity, after all, is not producing something new by rearranging deterministically what is already given, but producing something that cannot be derived from what is given. That’s why AI, if fed all Beethoven’s symphonies, for instance, presumably could produce a new symphony in the style of Beethoven but could not make the creative breakthrough Beethoven himself made with his Third Symphony. A better term for what we call Artificial Intelligence would be “Simulated Algorithmic Intelligence”—for AI is based on mimicking a particular and relatively uncharacteristic form of human intelligence: following step-by-step procedures. However, humans have some understanding of what they are doing when they follow step-by-step procedures and can deviate from them—which explains both why computers make fewer mistakes than humans when it comes to algorithmic tasks and why computers cannot come up with anything truly creative, even if they can come up with something new.
In the end, the threat to our humanity from AI is our imagining that we can subcontract out to a dumb machine tasks which require genuine human intelligence and creativity.
Joseph K. Cosgrove
providence college
worcester, massachusets
Finding Our Fathers
Mary Eberstadt’s “Finding Private Roy” (October 2025) brought back loving memories from discussions with my father, and there was much in her piece that reminded me of how grateful I am to have had a father like Harold J. Pummell. While there are many points at which these veterans’ experiences differ—my father served in Italy as an ambulance driver with the British 8th Army and was not subjected to the sustained horror that Sgt. Roy and his brothers-in-arms faced in Okinawa—his attitude toward serving in that conflict and his life upon return to the United States had many parallels to Sgt. Roy’s life as told by Eberstadt.
My father returned from the war and almost immediately sent a ticket to his fiancée, whom he had met at an American Red Cross Recreation Center in the London area. He and Anne married in 1946, had four children, and settled for about sixteen years in eastern Massachusetts. Dad got a job at the Watertown Arsenal location of the Army Materiel Command. He was a gentle father and a faithful husband.
We had a very comfortable life, never lacking for food or clothing. We were by no means rich, but my dad made sure we wanted for nothing. We attended an Episcopal church for most of my life while I lived with the family. My dad had a wonderful tenor voice, and I can still recall being awed by his singing hymns in church. Later in my life, while serving in the Army, my wife and I got to visit an old war buddy of my father’s in Newcastle, England. Over a beer and some pub food, he recited some of the shenanigans he and Harry (my dad) had engaged in. I have treasured that meeting ever since. Eberstadt’s story is unlike anything I’ve encountered before in print, and I’m so thankful that it appeared in your journal.
John A. Pummell
las cruces, new mexico
Reading Mary Eberstadt’s article gave me a better understanding of my own father’s time on Okinawa. My Dad was drafted at the age of twenty-nine, a father with three young children. He left when I was six months old, in April 1944, returning to Philadelphia in 1946.
My father’s greatest desire was to return to his Helen and his three daughters. The overwhelming fear he carried that this might not happen made him make a solemn vow to God—if he were able to return to his family, he promised to attend Mass every day for the rest of his life. It was his deep faith that encouraged him to make this vow, and it was that deep faith and grace that enabled him to keep his vow. I believe his daily reception of the Holy Eucharist until his death in 1983 was the source of strength that enabled his soul to heal and the darkness of that time to lose its power over him. For his example of deep faith and God’s blessing and protection upon him, I am deeply grateful.
Susanne B. Collins
exton, pennsylvania
Crowded Outdoors
Matthew Maguire needs to get out of Chicago. I have plenty of other things worth commenting on in his article (“The Cambrian Implosion,” October 2025), but I will comment on the decrease in fauna he experiences. The bugs that took over the raspberries in my garden this year are far beyond anything I’ve seen in the last five years: Asian beetles initially, followed by several species of wasps (some I have never seen before), bees, several fly species, ladybugs, and numerous spiders. I counted no less than eight bugs on one raspberry plant! I appreciate the numerous species of bees that pollinate my garden plants, but in the raspberries, it is nearly worthy of a horror movie. The critters around my acreage are no less than they have been in previous years, mostly raccoons and opossums. And the coyotes are heard more frequently and during the daylight—and they are getting closer. We still see bats flying around. I often cannot get back to sleep in the morning because of all the birds singing.
My wife is a transport nurse and twice, recently, the ambulance almost had to stop on the side of the road to clean the windshield because of the bug splatter; the visibility was that bad. I sometimes long for the decrease Maguire bemoans!
Mick Vanden Bosch
brandon, south dakota
Catholic Appreciation
Thank you for printing Kevin DeYoung’s wonderful review (“Enjoyably Evangelical,” October 2025). It makes me happy that we two disciples of the same Lord—who have never met each other, are of very different ages, and have such important theological disagreements—can genuinely love, listen to, respect, and understand each other. That is the only way the tragic divisions in the visible body of Christ can ever be healed. Though I am by temperament a pessimist, cynic, and curmudgeon, I am hopeful that reunion without compromise may someday be possible on objective theological issues if only we practice the subjective, personal openness and friendship typified by this reviewer.
For almost five hundred years, no one thought the two sides could agree about the single most important issue that sparked the Reformation, namely, justification by faith. (How do we get to heaven?) But it happened in the “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” approved by both Catholic and Lutheran authorities—and eventually groups representing three quarters of the world’s Christians—some twenty-five years ago. It happened because hearts educated heads; the personal goodwill bore theological fruit. It can happen on the other, lesser, but also apparently intractable issues, too, because if Goliath has been defeated, the other Philistines can be as well, and above all because the patience and generosity of our Father in heaven to his severely retarded children is amazing and unpredictable.
Peter Kreeft
boston college
west newton, massachusetts
In his review of Peter Kreeft’s From Calvinist to Catholic, Kevin DeYoung gives a very brief apologia for his enduring Calvinism. Crucially, DeYoung disagrees with Kreeft about the primacy of scripture. Catholics treat “the Eucharist instead of the Bible as the center of worship,” DeYoung notes, and he thinks this has led to the widespread ignorance of Scripture among Catholics.
As a former evangelical—a member, no less, of the team that won the 2005 Wesleyan Bible Quiz World Championship—and as a Catholic convert, I am troubled by Catholic ignorance of Scripture. Many of my very pious Catholic students don’t know who Naaman was or what Lincoln was referencing when he talked about slave owners “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” I want to make sure my six Catholic children learn the Bible.
My wife and I have found DeYoung’s The Biggest Story Bible Storybook a great help in this. DeYoung retells a much wider variety of stories from scripture than you get in a typical Bible storybook, all with an emphasis on unity. Everything points to Christ’s irruption into history. I remember making a few on-the-fly revisions as I read it to my kids, but on the whole, DeYoung’s book is a great catechetical resource for a Catholic family. Still, teaching my kids the stories of the Scripture isn’t the whole game. I want them to have a real faith, what the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards called “a true sense of the divine excellency of the things revealed in the word of God.”
Here’s what I mean. My wife and I made our six-year-old daughter memorize Colossians 3:2–4 last month. She learned the words and, insofar as she can, she rationally assents to Paul’s statement: “You died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” But there is a difference between knowing these words and properly appreciating their truth—just as, Edwards says, “there is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness.”
My prayer for my daughter is that she will develop a true sense of the words in her Bible verse, that she will experience the condescension of God directly and respond in adoration. Now, that isn’t the kind of knowledge I can just give to my daughter. But it is a grace that our Lord offers in the Eucharist. It’s precisely here that Jesus irrupts into our lives and makes his intimacy with us manifest. All this is to say, whatever catechetical shortcomings the Catholic Church has in regards to Scripture—and I think we can learn a great deal from Protestants here—treating the Eucharist instead of the Bible as the center of worship seems remarkably wise. How else are you going to develop a true sense of the Bible’s excellence?
Daniel Luttrull
bismarck, north dakota
My “Leftover” Embryos
I am a reader who felt not simply queasy but outright disgusted while reading about Orchid’s embryo selection technology in R. R. Reno’s “Eugenics Under the Flag of Choice” (October 2025). Not only will couples be induced to create embryos outside the womb, but as Reno points out, it’s all too likely that they will also be inclined to create a surplus of embryos to maximize their chances of hitting the genetic lottery. What, then, becomes of the embryos deemed not fit enough? They are destroyed, donated to science, or consigned to the freezer.
Alternatively, they may be adopted. That is precisely what my wife and I did with five “leftover” embryos, as documented in my book, Once Frozen, Now Family. (Apologies for the scare quotes: Fertility technology would seem to have a way of birthing such objectifying language.) While people of faith may reach different conclusions about what to do with the multitude of frozen embryos out there—more than a million in our nation—my wife and I determined that the most charitable thing we could do was to give a few a chance at continued life. It might all seem like science fiction, what with the cryo-shipping, the medications to prepare the mother’s body, the transfer procedure. And that might make some queasy. But as I see it, that’s what redemption in this grim corner of our broken world looks like. It looks like one of those five embryos, now beaming at you with a pudgy, radiant face.
Ezekiel Lee
hicksville, new york
Changing Her Mind?
In your October issue, R. R. Reno endorses Cardinal Newman’s support of the dogmatic reliability of the Catholic Church (“The Essential Newman,” October 2025). With Newman, he celebrates the Church’s “prerogative of infallibility”—its ability to pronounce spiritual truths without first convincing the “capricious, untrustworthy intellect.” This position has many flaws, but perhaps the most basic is that, since the Catholic Church has taken different and contradictory positions on spiritual truth at different times, it cannot claim to teach that truth infallibly.
On what spiritual matter do humans need guidance more pressingly than on who goes to heaven and how they get there? The answer is clear. A great many of us will not get to heaven but will suffer eternal separation from God in hell. The best and perhaps the only reliable way to avoid that is to become an express and intentional member of the Catholic Church. This was the position of Augustine, Aquinas, and most emphatically of Cardinal Newman himself. Now, each of the most recent popes has taught that the vast majority and perhaps all of humanity will probably go to heaven. Richard John Neuhaus himself wrote eloquently on the reasonableness of this hope.
Bravo! But how can a church that has taken such different positions claim to teach either of them infallibly? And this is not some obscure theological point but perhaps the most basic question a Christian can ask: What must I do to be saved?
I understand that exceedingly sharp intellects can argue that Catholic teaching—even in the old days—always contained the germ of the current position. Be that as it may, it does not save either Cardinal Newman’s position or Reno’s. They argue that on central points the public and dominant teaching of the Church can be relied on because it does not change. And on this most central issue, it has.
William F. Pedersen
south royalton, vermont
Fitting It All In
I appreciated Ephraim Radner’s “Bring Back Beautiful Sermons” (October 2025). Since, in my part of Christendom, the sermon is the number one job priority of the pastor, it is unwise to neglect this subject. Radner rightly reminds us that the sermon has been done differently—and done beautifully—in other epochs of the Church.
I wonder if Radner appreciates the load that the Sunday sermon carries in the many small Protestant churches. The sermon has to present the gospel, provide spiritual direction, talk about the current state of congregational life, connect the church to needs in the community, highlight projects that the congregation has on hand, inspire hope, and do some basic Bible and theological teaching. This makes it necessary to sharpen the message and craft a work that inspires within a tight time frame. Many preachers are not gifted with the ability to ramble through Scripture artfully. Few indeed are those with congregations that can make the time to listen. All is not dark, however. Just as a picture is designed with the future frame in mind, so a message can be crafted for the time available. This is an art, and it is done well in thousands of pulpits. In Bible study settings, our people are more than willing to hear a good pastor make connections across the Scriptures.
Pastor Harley Wheeler
new philadelphia, ohio
