Letters—August/September 2026

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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 September 4 for publication in the November issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.

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The People’s Oppressor

My first thought on “Boomer–Zoomer Housing War” (May 2026) by Carmel Richardson was the title; my second thought after reading the piece was, Why is this in First Things? My third thought was, Why don’t I feel guilty, and should I be sympathetic to younger Americans? The author displays limited knowledge of the market and cultural forces that influence real estate over an extended ­period of time and instead condemns old folks (not sure how she defines that) for “having it and holding it” (my term). That, of course, ignores what the oldsters experienced and sacrificed in ­acquiring the property. It reminded me of a friend whose hardworking great-grandfather acquired property that appreciated greatly in value much to the benefit of my bud. Part of that—just a part—was a “right place, right time” situation. I guess I should have been resentful or ­envious. 

Richardson moves on to discuss Social Security and Medicare, and she’s right that lots of old folks have those cards. Again, the old folks get blamed—I suppose for living so long. One of the thoughts that came to me was that perhaps we should all start looking for that cliff and just keep on walking. But then I remembered that many of these people paid at least something into the system for years, and ­many of us paid self-employed ­FICA contributions (at twice the rate) as well as paying the contributions of two-to-three employees for years. This is not meant to be a pat on our collective backs, but it was significant. In fact, I know ­many who would’ve opted out of Social Security, and instead retained all their contributions and paid into their own retirement, with a typical benefit measurably higher than Social Security—that’s the reality. Richardson is, among other things, clearly frustrated, but her blanket assertions are ill-­conceived and miss the mark. 

My final thought was, Why should older Americans be the scapegoat—other than that it’s easy? Walk in our shoes before you trash us, and don’t run to the politicians for your justice—they can be the other person’s oppressor. Nevertheless, my sympathy remains intact for young Americans in many respects, but that is despite the commentary and not because of it. God Almighty requires that we all do better—all of us.

James K. Cooper
marble falls, texas

Carmel Richardson replies: 

I am so glad you mentioned the title of my article. It may be of small comfort to you to know that I did not compose it, nor do I think it is quite correct. The word “war” is overused and overstates the situation. While writing headlines is not my job, it is my duty as a journalist to examine uncomfortable truths, one of which is a marked disparity in homeownership between ­twenty-five-to-thirty-year-olds today and the same demographic forty years ago. You’re correct to recognize there are many whose knowledge of markets and real estate far surpasses my own; one such writer, whom I cite in the piece, is Tom Owens. After examining CPI price data against median housing price changes between 2001 and 2025, Owens concludes: “The increase in housing prices is due to the broadly wealthy upper middle class being able and then forced to pay more.”

You noted that you know many who would have preferred to opt out of Social Security and instead to have paid into a normal retirement account, which typically, as you state, has a much higher rate of return. This makes me wonder: If your generation would prefer to invest its retirement differently, and would indeed benefit more from doing so, why would anyone ever choose to pay into Social Security? The answer, of course, is that no one chooses. Instead, the U.S. government thumbs the scale.

I’m currently responding to your letter from the very home mentioned at the beginning of my article, for which the sellers wanted $80,000 over its estimated value. We bought the home because the sellers were willing to negotiate down to roughly $40,000 over the independent appraisal price. Which is to say, I am neither frustrated, resentful, nor envious. I am indeed very grateful for our ability to afford this home. And I am fully aware that our situation is an outlier for my generation. There will always be men hardworking enough to overcome unbelievable odds, but this does not permit us to conclude, except illogically, that all hardship is wise and good. You are quite right that the government can be the other person’s oppressor. My conclusion is that it has been oppressing the middle class, while propping up extreme wealth and extreme poverty, for far too long. 

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Bushwhacking

I was puzzled to see my former boss, President George W. Bush, accused by Matthew Schmitz in “Faith-Based Failures” (May 2026) of being the culprit of a Somali childcare fraud case that occurred nearly two decades after the end of his presidency.

I served under President Bush as director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for more than four years. The only thing Mr. Schmitz got right was that the president sincerely believed that groups motivated by faith should not be discriminated against in their efforts to help addicts recover or to assist prisoners in reentering society and finding work. For President Bush, outcomes mattered, not the religious identities of providers.

The faith-based initiative was a presidential priority that succeeded against all odds. President Bush reauthorized “charitable choice” provisions to protect the hiring rights of religious organizations and, through a 2002 executive order, guaranteed equal treatment of faith-based organizations seeking federal funding. He successfully pressured Congress to pass tax incentives for increased charitable giving and secured hundreds of millions of dollars for the Compassion Capital Fund and the Access to Recovery voucher program.

Throughout his two terms, the president was careful to comply with constitutional safeguards and scrupulously adhered to church–state considerations of the First Amendment. His administration prohibited any group receiving public funds from preaching on Uncle Sam’s dime or discriminating on a religious basis against the recipients of publicly funded services. His faith-based initiative prevailed in all federal courts, including in a Supreme Court case in which I was the original named defendant.

Unfortunately, the newly named Faith Office has become so transparently politicized as to be unrecognizable. This process began in earnest with President Obama and did not slacken under President Biden.

President Bush deserves credit for his pioneering efforts to fund the most effective providers of social services. His “compassionate conservatism” unleashed what he called America’s “armies of compassion,” and America is better for it. That four presidential terms later a Minnesota governor allowed a “faith-based” scam to steal from the U.S. Treasury in broad daylight is hardly grounds for discrediting the good President Bush did with his historic and successful faith-based initiative.

 Jim Towey
falls church, virginia

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False Indicators

Siddhu Pachipala’s article “God and Man at MIT” (May 2026) touches on a major issue of the times: how to reconcile religious belief with an institution devoted to scientism. His sense that things are changing rings true, but these trends have occurred before and are often false indicators. His search for “the divine fingerprint on the world” is traced convincingly through observations in nuclear science, biology, and astrophysics. But there is one critical area that was briefly and ­incorrectly mentioned: evolution. 

This is critical as evolution ­created the seam and eventual separation between belief and ­science. Evolution, and its acceptance, brought forth Nietzsche’s nihilism, the destructive force of Marxism, and the validation of atheism. His statement that evolution “may explain the mechanism by which species emerge over time” awaits confirmation to this day, as not one species has ever been shown to evolve by a Darwinian stepwise process. Attraction to the theory of evolution persists only because of its atheistic allowances. And while the Wistar Conference in 1966 was the first anomaly to satisfy Kuhn’s theory of scientific ­revolution—as it showed the mathematical ­­impossibility of spontaneously ­creating life ­proteins—math doesn’t capture the mind like evolution captures the soul. 

My point is that Pachipala feels there will be a top-down change in theological belief. This is very unlikely, as religious belief was destroyed in a bottom-up movement with the acceptance of the theory of evolution. So, it must be resurrected with a bottom-up realization that evolution is widely known to be impossible. Every branch of science—from physics, microbiology, and chemistry to mathematics and astrophysics—is determinative of its destruction. As Einstein mused almost a hundred years ago: “Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.” As the most destructive theory ­science ever developed, it must be understood as the barrier to any advancement in understanding our divine purpose.

James S. Puterbaugh
portland, oregon

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Wrestling with Truth 

I appreciate Bishop Barron’s digital outreach to young people and enjoy listening to his homilies. However, I was disappointed by his screed about American universities (“Recovering the University’s Soul,” May 2026). It superficially engages ideas and disregards valuable insights from important thinkers. 

Bishop Barron repeats arguments we have heard for decades (exemplified in works by fine thinkers like Allan Bloom, Alasdair MacIntyre, and George Marsden). He regurgitates familiar claims about the philosophical materialism of Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Foucault. He uncritically recites hackneyed philosophical phrases (“existence precedes essence” and “the death of God”). In a few paragraphs, Bishop Barron explicates and dismisses complex ideas and casually drops a host of names. 

In addition to this intellectual shallowness, Bishop Barron’s essay displays an uncharitable stance toward his interlocutors. Yes, ­Foucault adopts a pernicious view of the self. But he also offers insights about madness and incarceration. Sartre mistakenly rejects essence but highlights important features of existence. Marx is profoundly mistaken about philosophical materialism and religious life. Yet he also considers important questions about work and alienation. Surely, we can graciously receive wisdom from others while also defending a Christian anthropology. 

Universities should encourage contemplation and pursue truth. They must also help us wrestle with complex ideas and learn to curtail facile responses to them. What universities don’t need are more uninformed diatribes about the state of American higher education. 

Derek S. Jeffreys
the university of wisconsin
green bay, wisconsin 

Bravo, Bishop Barron. What a wonderful wander, replete with thrill and contemplation.

I think, however, that you may have omitted the primordial cause of our plight: self-consciousness. In wonder and in contemplation, the self is put aside. So any mental attitude that always insists upon self-consciousness makes them ­impossible.

C. S. Lewis made this clear in his Abolition of Man. A waterfall is an object of wonder, filling us with delight. But to the degree that we turn from it and think instead of it causing an effect on ourselves, we begin to lose that effect because we are no longer looking at the waterfall but only at ourselves. Actually, we lose ourselves as well, as beings that gaze upon a delightful phenomenon. Instead, we imagine some impersonal viewpoint above both ourselves and the waterfall from which we look down on both as mere facts, that is, things that cannot possibly inspire.

But this externalization (or alienation) of the self and its world is the essential starting point for the historicism that dominates our thought today, especially in the social sciences. In other words, we can no longer marvel that two and two become four if we are told that this is just a fact inculcated into our brains by our first-grade teachers. It is then an easy next step to think cynically that those teachers were exerting power over us for ­nefarious purposes. 

Richard Stith
valparaiso, indiana

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Worthy of His Name? 

It’s a credit to First Things’s quality that I can read articles in back-to-back issues making almost opposite arguments and find myself nodding along with both nearly to the end. In Brad East’s “Mainlining Nostalgia” (April 2026) in the issue, we were warned against lukewarm spiritual NGOs by the illustration of the mainline denominations’ suicide, while in James Wood’s “In Defense of Cultural Christianity” (May 2026) we heard that keeping people in pews is praeparatio evangelica. However, while Wood defines his terms and artfully anticipates counterarguments like a skilled debater, he does it too well. He left me feeling fast-talked, not convinced. 

“Cultural Christians,” as Wood precisely defines them, seem a distinctive but quite small group, and I doubt David French worries too much about them. The real issue is “cultural Christianity.” Wood and French would agree that those who use Christianity as a tribal marker and ideological weapon are committing sacrilege, but disagree about where the line is. Wood asks, Whence the urgency of today’s critics? They can point quickly to the recent and not anomalous example of Paula White-Cain’s conflation of two quite different passions over Easter. It’s true and annoying that high-placed connoisseurs of Christian culture generally punch at the faithful on the right, and not at Nancy Pelosi. On the other hand, I thought we agreed a long time ago not to treat that brand of faith ­seriously anyway. With trends as they are, it’s not like there’s anything useful one can do that the passage of time won’t. 

Wood wins his argument when he narrows his aperture and sidesteps the stickier parts of the question as “pagan identitarianism.” Fair enough. But if East is right that Cold War cultural Christianity is not our solution and led to the dysfunctions of this moment, how does Wood propose avoiding the same mistakes? 

Brevin Anderson
alexandria, virginia

James Wood’s essay was the most comprehensive and eloquent defense of cultural Christianity I have seen. He astutely points out that external pressure can be a valuable means of conforming people to Christian principles.

In my own experience competing in collegiate debate, the absence of common ground between citizens makes productive debate in the public square impossible. The conservative and Christian convictions of my team were so wildly different from the modern, secular world­view of the students we would debate that, at certain points, I even questioned whether natural law was real. Quite far from restricting the public square unduly, cultural Christianity establishes the basis for quality discussion. 

I do believe Wood overstates the extent to which the 1950s were a genuine revival of cultural Christianity. See President Eisenhower’s famous statement: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” If cultural Christianity is to be potent at all, it needs to be doctrinally thick, not the paper-thin civil religion found on our coinage.

Cooper Cobbs
purcellville, virginia

James R. Wood’s reference to “God-fearer” in his nuanced and thought-provoking essay brings to mind perhaps the most influential “God-fearer” of all time. That would be the centurion Cornelius, whom we meet in Acts 10. His praeparatio evangelica did not spring from Christianity, but rather from the Judaism he encountered. Not merely a pleasant turn of phrase, phoboumenos ton theon (God-fearer) is a technical description that refers to Gentiles who are attracted to Judaism but have not converted. ­Cornelius was among what must have been a significant number of Gentiles who were attracted to the contrasting, relative stability of what Judaism had to offer as opposed to what they had. This explains the inclusion of the court of the Gentiles in the Temple complex, where these “God-fearers” could draw nigh (but not too nigh) to Israel’s God. These were also known as “proselytes at the gate.” It seems that Cornelius and his household were primed for belief by the religious structures of Jewish culture in a way that is analogous to Wood’s practical understanding of the potential of Christian culture. And of course, as we read on in Acts 10, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Gentiles in Cornelius’s household placed the gospel on a quite unexpected trajectory that ­continues to this day. 

One quibble: Likening people who “grow up in hubs like the ‘­Bible Belt’” to first-century converts from Judaism does not hold water. The Jewish–Christian parting of ways had not yet occurred, and to this day, Jewish people who embrace the gospel, such as myself, are often quite definite in continuing their identity as Jews.

Alan Shore
bellingham, washington

James Wood’s primary concern in “In Defense of Cultural Christianity” is that the Church has developed an impoverished account of societal goods. Dismissing such goods available in “Christian culture” and enacted by “cultural Christians” trivializes the social benefits of praeparatio evangelica, plausibility structures, habituation to the good, and restraint of evil. Behind this dismissal, Wood argues, lies a spiritual egalitarianism rooted in revivalist and voluntarist assumptions that cannot recognize goods decoupled from conversion. 

Wood’s concerns have merit. However, using phrases like ­“Christian culture” or “cultural Christians” collapses the distinction between a sacred Christian social order and a given culture’s order. Whatever ease phrases like “Christian culture” offer, Scripture uses “Christian” to describe only those united to Christ. Applying it elsewhere suggests Christ is not essential to its meaning. We may speak of “Christian influence,” but describing cultures and people who do not proclaim “Jesus is Lord” as Christian requires them to bear a name they are unequipped to carry. 

Avoiding terminology like “Christian culture” provides Christians an opportunity to renew their commitment to fully acknowledging God’s reality. God establishes nations within a given region and for a given time so that people might “seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:27). Social goods offer glimmers of God’s glory shining through the distinct cultural patterns of a given nation that gesture beyond the culture. But like the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–40) who cannot understand what he is reading without a guide, those who recognize social goods are left to worship an unknown God, habituated to a partial vision of reality mediated by a culture vying for the allegiance that belongs to God alone. 

Christians must acknowledge goods wherever they are found as they point beyond them to the God who is their source. As sojourners and exiles (1 Pet. 2:11), our particular allegiance to Christ marks the difference between a community that has been baptized in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit and a culture that should not be pressed to bear his name in vain.

James Spencer
o’fallon, illinois

“One who straddles the yellow line gets hit by traffic in both directions” is a saying applicable to the article by James R. Wood. On the one hand, Christ warns in the Sermon on the Mount: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt. 7:21). On the other hand, Karl Rahner wrote half a century ago in his prescient article, “The Diaspora Church,” that “one new member who decides to join [the Church] from his own genuine decision of faith carries more weight than three who, while belonging, or seeming to belong to her, really do so only because of the weight of social tradition.”

Finally, in Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, “People say, ‘The Church ought to give us a lead.’ That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practicing Christians.” Of course, “practicing Christians” means absolutely nothing if applied to the United States with its immense diversity of Christian denominations.

Spencer F. Stopa
mesa, arizona

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Materialism Dethroned

Michel-Yves Bolloré’s “How Science Killed Materialism” (May 2026) is a lucid and timely corrective, and I am genuinely grateful you chose to feature it. For two centuries, materialism rode the coattails of Copernicus, Darwin, and Laplace, confident that science had rendered a Creator superfluous. Bolloré shows, with admirable clarity, how the very same enterprise has quietly reversed course.

Thermodynamics revealed an arrow of time and a low-entropy beginning; general relativity and the cosmic microwave background established a finite-age Big Bang; precision measurements disclosed the razor-sharp fine-tuning of roughly thirty physical constants without which stars, galaxies, or life could not exist; and molecular biology exposed DNA as an information-dense code whose origin no known chemical pathway explains. Taken together, these findings leave thoughtful readers with the sense that reality is more textured and mysterious—and, in an important way, more welcoming to meaning—than the old materialist story allowed.

Materialism has responded with multiverse speculation and appeals to future undiscovered laws—­hypotheses that, as Bolloré notes, often lack observational support and merely relocate the problem. For many of us, this feels less like an advance in understanding than an effort to preserve a prior commitment. The result is not proof of God, but a decisive erosion of the old claim that science has closed the case against transcendence.

For readers seeking to reconcile faith and reason, this restoration of meaning offers a measure of hope and steadiness, better equipping us for tikkun olam—“the repair of the world”—through purposeful action rather than materialist drift.

First Things has done its readers a real service by publishing this clear-eyed account, and I suspect many, like me, will return to it more than once, both for its arguments and for the quiet encouragement it provides.

Christopher Fennell
milledgeville, georgia