Letters—June/July 2026

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 July 6 for publication in the October issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.

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Is Assimilation Bad?

The sentimental images painted of proud, tight-knit communities slowly crumbling away are compelling, but I have to question if this shift is as bad as D. P. ­Curtin makes it out to be (“When the Bells Stop Ringing,” April 2026). I will never get to know the joys and benefits of being a part of an ethnic church, and all of the sermons I hear are delivered in English. However, many of the community-­driven aspects of congregational life that Curtin describes as fading, I see every week at my ethnically diverse church. My congregation has members whose ancestral backgrounds represent just about every corner of the globe, and we get together for regular feasts, attend weekly suppers in neighborhood groups, and have a choir and other groups for more specific studies and support. Our membership is increasing rapidly as well, and there is a flourishing group of young people, freshly moved to the city, who have found community here away from home. 

After I read “When the Bells Stop Ringing,” the Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota came to mind—a deeply religious and tight-knit ethnic group who actively worked against American assimilation. It is fair to say that I would much rather these communities absorb our culture’s traditions and values, even if I am wary of much about modern America. I think Curtin very accurately describes the problems with America’s secularization and illustrates some of the consequences of the mass movement to cities over recent decades, but immigrant communities have sought to be folded into America’s identity, as opposed to being kept apart, since the nation’s inception. Both the nation and these communities have often benefited when “American culture” supersedes the ethnic.

Ren Hope
austin, texas

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On Many Fronts

It is perhaps a testament to the lingering power of the postwar consensus that Sean McMeekin, in an otherwise admirable article (“Goodbye to the Postwar Consensus,” April 2026), remarks in passing on Darryl Cooper’s “downplaying if not denial of the Holocaust” during his 2024 interview with Tucker ­Carlson. This claim, widely circulated at the time, is false. Mr. Cooper’s comments related specifically to his opinion that the Nazi regime failed to plan for the millions of Russian POWs and other political prisoners that would be taken on the Eastern Front, a failure which led to the deaths of millions through disease, exposure, mass killings, and starvation; they were not in reference to the deliberate and systematic destruction of Jews and other groups known as the Holocaust. 

I am confident that this misrepresentation was a mere inadvertence on the part of McMeekin, arising from how frequently the claim has been made and by whom (for example, the United States Congress in House Resolution 1543). Still, such accusations are grave, and I was disappointed to read them repeated so carelessly in these pages.

Caleb Hamel
kewaunee, wisconsin

Pity the poor publisher who endeavors to systematize the mind of Donald Trump. The lag of print led to a magazine hitting ­mailboxes with a lead feature touting the ­Donroe doctrine—with its supposed de-emphasis on warring in the Middle East—alongside Operation Epic Fury in Iran. Perhaps the dizzying ride on his foreign policy merry-go-round will prompt a broader reassessment of Trump from those on the First Things masthead. 

Maybe that reconsideration was already in some sense underway before the April edition went to press. Dominic Green’s review of Mafia: A Global History (“Back Room to Boardroom”) takes a giant, if unexpected, step toward actually telling the truth about Trump. As Green suggests, the president is called “the Don” by those closest to him for good reason. The Trump family’s current corrupt-in-plain-sight connections to places like the United Arab Emirates may well have more explanatory power than any foreign affairs doctrine ever could.

John Murdock
bloomburg, texas

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Novel Inventions

Jonathan Clarke’s “Pitch for a Catholic Novel” (April 2026) is a nice enough jaunt through a group of the greats of Catholic literature, but I must vehemently disagree with his assertion that “readers must call forth the writer, not the other way around.” It is precisely the writer who must call forth the reader, if we are to expect anything more than a grand continuum of slop. What is AI (and LLMs specifically) other than a writer who is called upon by the reader? 

It is only the novels through which writers call forth their readers that have stood the test of time and engraved themselves in the hearts of generations of readers. For more truly great Catholic novels to exist, their writers must be willing to boldly take part in the creation of new stories, experiences, and characters that communicate some part of the wild and wonderful truth of Catholicism. I encourage Mr. Clarke to move forward with the writing of his novel, provided he worries more about his banker’s story and less about what I or other readers may wish for.

M. J. O’Connor
mexico city, mexico

I take many issues with Jonathan Clarke’s essay. For the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on his preposterous claim that “the novel is a secular form, with origins in the Enlightenment’s concern with reason and the claims of the individual.”

This statement evidences the author’s devastating Anglocentrism, which blinds him to the existence of a whole tradition of the novel that is prior to the Enlightenment. Examples abound: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Robinson Crusoe (1719), and, most notably, El Buscón (1626), Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), and Don Quixote (1605–15). There are even medieval examples of epic, chivalric literature that set the ground for the Christian model of virtue, such as La Chanson de Roland (from the eleventh century) and El Cid (from the twelfth). Long before the Enlightenment, the grounds for the Catholic novel had already been set during the Christian millennium. The height of the novel was then reached in the Spanish Siglo de Oro, whose prose fiction developed in the indisputably Catholic culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century Spain.

I’ve noticed a tendency among American cultural commentators—especially Catholic ones—to believe implicitly that the novel was born within or around the time of Jane Austen. They attribute to it a Protestant character. Thus the Catholic writer must be a foreigner in the land of the novel. Clarke seems to buy into this vision, in which the best a Catholic can do is inhabit the novel as a talented imitator of a form that doesn’t belong to him. This vision is not only wrong but also insidious, as it leads Catholic, especially cradle-Catholic, novelists to engage in their work without confidence.

Catholic novelists have a treasure trove from which to pick when it comes to inspiration. The novelistic tradition is theirs for the taking. The only thing you have to do to find it is look, however briefly, beyond the curriculum of a high school English class.

Roberto Gómez Orea
guadalajara, mexico

I enjoyed Jonathan Clarke’s call for Catholic writers. Materialist modernity must be met with a sacramental view of the world—that, even beyond the confines of the Church’s liturgy, God and the spirits he commands are hiding in plain sight among his creatures, ready to reveal a world to come already at work. This is imperative not only to confront materialism but also the recent resurrection of the idea that Jungian archetypes or tarot arcana are running our world. (I recently attended an event at an Ivy League university, during which one of this country’s leading literati performed a tarot reading.) There is one God at play among his creatures. The novel, like the Old Testament stories that (according to Erich Auerbach) eventually gave rise to it, remains in a prime position to scratch away at the thin veneer of sensible reality masking truth from the faithless. The novel is a place of friction between broken people and their healer. Jesus breaks through via miracles only to tell us they are not the point, that he is rather creating in us the faith by which we can see through the veil into the sanctuary. This is the experience of Moses at the burning bush and Isaiah at the throne of God—a numinous moment gives way to a lifetime of deepening perception. This is the force of the first modern novel, Don Quixote—in which a man is rescued from his pursuit of alternate realities by the body of Christ surrounding him in his faithful friends. (Here I show my one disagreement with Clarke; the novel is not an Enlightenment project, though individualism may have hijacked the form.) 

I have been trying to perform the work of “mystification” in my own (deliberately non-pious) novels, wherein a shocking rupture in the created order makes embodied souls discover with what power God wants to work through them. Perhaps Clarke and First Things readers will tell me if I am succeeding in the Catholic novel or not.

Peter A. Heasley
new york, new york

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My Feminism and Yours

Among the predictably fiery critiques of Carrie Gress’s work I’ve read, Helen Roy’s stands out as the most cogent (“Witch Hunt,” April 2026). Feminism has many strands, so one person’s “feminism” may bear little relation to another’s. Feminism has a proud egalitarian chapter, which no reasonable person would dispute. Yet some versions of feminism hold that women are collectively oppressed and disrespected by men, and they always have been. This way of thinking can be so strident that it could be described as misandrist. Meanwhile, other feminists advocate a “healthy masculinity” in men and boys. But for sincere Catholics such as Gress, the nub of the problem is found in abortion. Susan Brownmiller’s early women’s liberation activism led her to openly and bravely discuss her illegal abortions. Today, however, women celebrate and dance at their abortion parties—so it is fair to say that feminism, women’s rights, and abortion are conjoined. This kind of feminism can’t be fused with Catholicism. Here lies the source of Dr. Gress’s ire toward feminism. 

Carrie Gress has elsewhere devoted her time and energy to uplifting women toward their God-given gifts and their innate feminine beauty. Perhaps this generative vision might be something that a new generation of feminists might someday come to appreciate.

For serious investigations into feminism, interested readers can turn to Daphne Patai’s Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies and the extensively detailed Misandry trilogy by Paul Nathanson and ­Katherine Young. All should be available from your local library.

L. H. Clarke
eastport, maine

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In God’s Household

Thank you to R. R. Reno for “The Scandal of Judaism” (April 2026). Reno focuses on St. Paul’s extended meditation on Jewish unbelief in the gospel message, laid out in his Letter to the Romans, chapters 9 through 11. I would like to comment on a different aspect of that passage, namely, Paul’s remarkable use of the present tense to describe his kinsmen in positive terms as God’s covenant partners, irrespective of their posture toward the gospel. At the start of the passage, Paul affirms his fellow Jews, including those who do not believe in Christ: “They are Israelites,” and they enjoy a host of divine benefits, including “the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises” (9:4–5). Grammarians classify Paul’s “are” (εισιν) as a customary present, signaling an ongoing state of affairs without a temporal terminus. Sure enough, at the conclusion of the passage, Paul reaffirms that Jews who do not accept the gospel “are loved on account of the patriarchs, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (11:28–29). Paul’s expectation is clear. Christians should regard their Jewish neighbors, whether Christ-followers or not, as people who are God’s covenant partners, not only people who were or will be. 

Reno is correct that Paul begins the passage in question by expressing anguish that most of his kinsmen haven’t received the gospel. But that is not where Paul ends up. Instead, he draws the remarkable conclusion that God is responsible for Israel’s “no” to the gospel and that God is using it for the benefit of the nations. “A hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in” (11:25). Because Paul thinks God is behind Israel’s “no,” he does not seem anxious to promote evangelistic efforts by Gentile Christians directed toward Jews, as though Israel’s salvation depended on it. Indeed, at the end of the day, Paul’s faith in Christ seems to have made him remarkably free from anxiety on behalf of the ultimate salvation of everyone, Jew and Gentile alike. To be sure, Paul knows nothing more precious than the gospel of ­Jesus Christ, and he fervently desires that all may believe, the sooner the better. But the insight Paul chooses to leave his readers with at the very end of the passage is a lightning bolt of discomfiting reassurance: “God has imprisoned everyone in disobedience, so that he may be merciful to all” (11:32).

Kendall Soulen
decatur, georgia

R. R. Reno raises many ­important points and comes to the same conclusion that I do when I read Paul. There is a certain reciprocity ordained by God in his strategy of redemption. The Jew is steward of a specific revelation in the form of law—then the partial rejection of the gospel by those same Jews leads to the incorporation of Gentiles. Note that the terms election and choice are used most frequently when Gentile readers are being addressed in the epistles. The author is being careful to point out that the exclusion of Gentiles was meant to be temporary; God always intended for the scope of redemption to be enlarged. 

Then there is the matter of what happens next. As Reno noted, Paul says that the Gentiles, now included in God’s household, will undertake and succeed at evangelizing the Jews who remain in rebellion. As I relate in my commentary on Romans, a copy of which I gave to Reno at St. George’s in Colorado Springs some years ago, there is the wonderful story of Naomi and Ruth. I’m fond of pointing out that God tends to do things twice: once in history in a limited sense, then again spiritually with no limitation for all peoples, times, and places. The famine in Israel leads Naomi to venture to Gentile lands. There she is sustained until the famine abates. In the meantime, the Gentile Ruth recognizes that, in the words of ­Jesus, salvation is from the Jews and insists on returning with Naomi to the land of Israel. There the Jews rejoice at Naomi’s return and give the Moabitess Ruth their blessing, in spite of the fact that the Jewish law precludes the inclusion of Moabites, even down to the tenth generation. Thus the supplanting of the law by the gospel is predicted when historical animosities will be erased. 

It is important to remember that Paul draws a distinction between justification and salvation. The former, as he states in Romans 5 and 10, is universal; all humanity stands justified by the shed blood of ­Jesus Christ. Salvation, on the other hand, is particular and involves a human response to this new status we’ve been accorded. In no case is our response to God’s favor perfect, and it is up to God to interpret our feeble efforts as fruitful or not. Perhaps the piety of the Jew today is sufficient in his eyes. Just as Paul raised money among his Gentile converts to bring relief to Jews in whose spiritual debt they stood, the entire Christian Church is obligated to look forward to the day when we will have the opportunity to return to Jews the blessing they at one time gave unknowingly to us.

Robert McLeod
little rock, arkansas

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Christ the Globalist

R. R. Reno wrote about Marco Rubio and JD Vance’s call for embracing and re-establishing Christian faith in Western society as the means for revitalizing the economy of the West (“Trump’s Civilizational Project,” April 2026). They are wrong. Christian faith is not a tool or technology one can employ to directly address economic issues.

Jesus said his government would be like yeast in bread and seeds in the ground long before their effect on the social environment can be seen. Once securely established and growing, seeds begin to fly into neighboring fields and spread the invasion. Even if over time they are poisoned and uprooted from the original field, seeds from the neighbor’s fields come blowing back and new plants will continue to re-emerge. This is how the gospel triumphs socially. Christ’s reign on earth establishes itself from the ground up in people’s hearts and not from the top down by legislation. In Christ’s kingdom there is only one law, and that is to love one another, making both law enforcement and national defense systems obsolete. During the period of Judges, the national defense was God’s business, and God did a fantastic job, raising up temporary leaders to respond to every emergency. Christ initiated for the entire world what Moses and Joshua had started in Israel.

The following scriptural truths should help us understand what God has been doing: In Genesis God scattered the people and created the nations, but in Revelation God gathers them. Today the entire human population is on the move, both scattering and gathering. The Church has followed the historical pattern of the Hebrew experience. Israel had its Saul and David, and the Church had its Constantine. The Hebrews had their temple, and the Church has its cathedrals; however, the new government from heaven needs neither temples nor cathedrals, because we ourselves are the dwelling place of God by the Holy Spirit. The reign of Christ grows from the ground up and governs by the law of love, while Satan’s kingdom rules by enforcement of laws from the top down.

It is not Western culture that we promote or defend. Jesus did not come to defend boundaries but rather to break them down and make us one. America’s Christians should enthusiastically welcome the newcomers with the evangelistic opportunity that their arrival presents. Also, the West needs immigration for the sake of ­re-evangelization. Today, African Christian immigrants are bringing the gospel back to a paganized Europe and its empty cathedrals. People from unreached Islamic nations, such as Somalia and Afghanistan, are coming to the West and finding Christ through the hospitality of Christians. If we truly see ourselves as one body in Christ worldwide, then the time will come when no earthly nation will permit us to join their armies. We will by then have a reputation for loving our enemies too much. Instead of singing wartime patriotic songs, we will be praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ on the other side of any earthly conflict. 

Philip E. Friesen
minneapolis, minnesota