Letters

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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 March 3 for publication in the May ­issue. Please send them to ft@­firstthings.com.

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Christian Civ

In a beautiful essay (“Against Christian Civilization,” ­January 2025) somewhat reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s Attack Upon “­Christendom”, Paul Kingsnorth makes a strong case that serious Christians in the West should turn a deaf ear to the battle cry of “civilizational Christianity.” Setting aside the question of whether Kingsnorth is quite right about what God requires of us (or, on the other hand, whether ­Pulcheria—to take an example more or less at ­random—was truly a saint, or whether St. Augustine distinguished correctly in Contra Faustum between bodily action and inward disposition), in the end no polemic will be necessary to ensure that the project of civilizational Christianity comes to grief. Such a project is part and parcel of our nostalgic culture, which is characterized by soulless “reboots” and other derivative works the promoters bring to market because the intellectual property is ready-made. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Jordan B. Peterson, God save him, will soon turn to dust again.

Timothy M. Terhaar
long island city, new york

There is much to commend in the Erasmus Lecture given by Paul Kingsnorth. He rightly identifies the need for us Christians to ­differentiate ourselves from the assumptions of our culture: to live and affirm gospel values often sharply at odds with many with whom we must live and work. However, Kingsnorth goes too far in suggesting that it is no longer valid for Christians to make common cause with others to defend a set of governing principles for which earlier generations of Christians struggled and died. Such a radical withdrawal from the world because of its corruption was something the Pharisees advocated. They even rejected Jesus as the Messiah because he was “unclean” in their eyes. They were repeatedly challenged in this by Jesus. To turn away from the world to avoid contamination by it is to reject Jesus’s own example. For while we were yet sinners, he came and died for us. 

Instead, Our Lord calls us to “care of the widow and the orphan,” to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” St. Paul admonishes us to pray for our government leaders—to be, in essence, good citizens. In fact, in the early years of the Church, Christians remained very much engaged in the world and even became soldiers in a pagan emperor’s army. To turn away now from the defense of the rule of law, the integrity of national borders, and democracy itself, as flawed as all that is, is to abandon the weak and defenseless to the tyrant.

Robert N. Landback
bloomfield, connecticut

Paul’s Kingsnorth believes there’s a form of Christianity on the rise that “puts civilization first and Christianity second.” This ­Christianity, Kingsnorth argues, turns out to be no Christianity at all. While I agree with Kingsnorth’s conclusion, I have questions about how he gets there.

Kingsnorth observes a series of “deadly results” that follow the disobedience of our first parents. Kingsnorth writes, “Farming happened. . . . Work happened. Murder happened. Cities happened. Civilization happened.” The humble gardeners became prideful, murderous civilization-builders.

It seems to me this way of framing the biblical story fails to account for two things: the story’s beginning and end. In the beginning, humanity is given what is often called the cultural mandate (Gen. 1:28), a mandate humans waste no time getting to following their expulsion from Eden. The early chapters of ­Genesis describe the arts, metallurgy, and other culture-building enterprises moving forward, albeit in a ­crooked, perverted manner. It’s not the civilization-building activities that are the problem, but the way these activities nearly always exploit some aspect of God’s creation.

The Bible closes by describing creation moving toward what could be termed “civilizational Christianity,” that is, life oriented around a city, the New Jerusalem. This city, John writes in Revelation, includes “the glory of the kings of earth,” which I take to mean the cultural spoils of the decimated human kingdoms built in vainglory.

Given the biblical story’s beginning and end, it seems that God is opposed to the abusive tendencies of civilization that nearly always turn up in a fallen world, not to civilization per se. It is here that the work of Christ surprises: A carpenter from the backwoods builds a kingdom to crush all kingdoms with nothing but wood and nails. The meek shall indeed inherit the earth.

Casey Shutt
oklahoma city, oklahoma

My Gay Comedy

As someone who also returned to Catholicism after same-sex relationships (in my case, a ­l­esbian marriage), there was much of Karl Johann Petersen’s “My Gay ­Tragedy” (January 2025) to which I could relate. Especially poignant was his description of the thrill of normalcy when in a heterosexual relationship. When I left my same-sex “marriage” and entered into a relationship with my now husband, I felt that same sense of wonder and contentment at simply not fighting biology, tradition, and God. How much easier and more beautiful life had become. This is in stark contrast to another thing the author captures well, namely, the ugliness of LGBTQ subcultures.

Petersen’s most important contribution to the unnecessarily fraught discussion of homosexuality and religion is, in my view, two-fold: first, challenging the notion of immutable homosexuality, something I also disbelieve in both experience and observation; and second, calling foul on the depth of concern so-called allies actually hold for the same-sex-attracted person. Petersen sums up much of identity politics in the West when he says, “Indeed, it is not even necessary for him to be happy, since everyone else is happy for him, and that is really the point.”

It is the eclipsing of the whole person in favor of the politically advantageous part that has left many homosexual-identified people in the lurch, especially those whose childbearing years have been wasted. Like Petersen, I am profoundly grateful for the experience of parenthood and lament, deeply, my later start. I hope this letter reaches the author as an encouragement to continue writing in the face of the special venom reserved for us, of whom there are more than meets the eye: ­formerly LGBTQ-identifying people who have reclaimed our freedom and our fulfillment in Christ. 

Linda Gray
north carolina

Theory and Practice

Anselm Audley’s “Cities for Humans” (January 2025) vividly portrays the contrast between ­Corbusier’s impersonal, efficient “grid of motorways and tower blocks” and the nostalgic homes and genteel plazas of Léon Krier’s walkable, fifteen-minute towns. The difference between the two is not just aesthetic. As Christian professor and architect David Wang says, “Any vision of city planning amounts to more than just a theory, but a worldview.” Corbusier’s will to power and materialist worldview juxtaposes poorly with the humane, patient consultative approach of Krier.

Twentieth-century theologian Jacques Ellul, in The Meaning of the City, conveys what is at stake in city planning when he warns that design for mere consumerism and commercial servitude makes a city “a place of idols.” He said, “The man who disappears into the city becomes merchandise.” In such a place, a person is “separated from himself and others by a sheet of glass, invisible yet present, ­unbreakable, ­impassable. Never alone yet deserted . . . in a perpetual noise that eliminates any isolation, any meditation, any authentic contact. . . . Even if no one is paying attention to him or especially observing him, he is under the control of others”

It is heartening that in one of ­Krier’s planned communities, Cayalá, “a church takes pride of place.” In most fifteen-minute city schemes, a diagram of all the needs of the community omits places of worship. The Catholic parish concept makes a new kind of sense in the walkable city.

Things that don’t fit in it as well include school choice, Amazon fulfillment centers, large families, the elderly and disabled, and church affiliation based on doctrinal distinctions, not location. The appealing human scale of mixed-used, low-carbon-footprint enclaves is not to be mistaken for real community. Wang calls many of the new urbanists’ plans “stage sets,” created by what Ellul would call “technique” rather than by “warm and messy human relationships.” Catholic philosopher Julianne Romanello observes how cities often implement the fifteen-minute plan, funding it through public-private partnerships that are more opaque and less accountable than elected governments. They use new urbanist “nudges” like lane diets, roundabouts, and high on-street parking fees to manipulate traffic, as well as surveillance to monitor where car tags travel. 

No matter how quaint the result, one man’s nudge is still another man’s nuisance.

Leah Farish
tulsa, oklahoma

I read Anselm Audley’s “Cities for Humans” with a growing mixture of horror and delight: delight at reading so many of my own thoughts about urban design and modernism presented with such lucidity; horror that, as this appeared in print, I had just finished drafting an essay on many of these same themes and will have to substantially rework it. Time and tide, I suppose. I would like to add, though, a bit more of an on-the-ground American perspective. Purpose-built communities like Poundbury and Seaside are lovely exemplars, but for most people working in careers connected to large institutions, the cities we have are the cities we’ve got. This has meant, for my family, moving to Baltimore, one of the few affordable places with a semblance of walkable streets.

For the better part of a decade, though, we lived in San Antonio, a mustard seed of charm ­surrounded by a dreary expanse of homogenized suburbia. Two of its great ­attractions—the older Riverwalk and the newer Pearl District—are perfect examples of what happens when designers committed to urban renewal are forced to work within American building codes. The downtown Riverwalk is a fully pedestrian enclosure, lined with gaudy restaurants and shops, terminating in a large 1980s-style shopping mall. It was made possible only by the complete parking-lot-­ification of the city’s downtown. Any attempt to traverse downtown on the surface, say, to reach the Alamo from the Tobin Center, is a hot walk along narrow treeless sidewalks bordering parking garages and strip malls. Meanwhile, the Pearl, a lovely mixed-use development finished during our time there, is ­surrounded on all sides by a parking moat, and the short walk from the St. Mary’s Strip is an uninviting slog I made daily on principle alone.

Suffice it to say that the Riverwalk and the Pearl are both valiant attempts to create human-centered spaces (the latter more ­successfully). But model communities and boutique zoning exceptions will remain bourgeois novelties until we commit ourselves to changing state and federal regulations and personally invest in imperfect, but improvable, neighborhoods.

William Rhea
baltimore, maryland

Real Science

I am grateful to Dan ­Hitchens for a generous and insightful overview of my work (“Iain ­McGilchrist’s New Era,” January 2025), in particular of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. I do not write in any way to take issue, but just to clarify, at his invitation, a couple of points raised—not that I think Hitchens has misunderstood, but because a casual reader might draw a mistaken conclusion.

The first is to do with the status of science, and the second to do with the status of religion.

First, on science, I wouldn’t want any reader to come away with the idea that the difference between the hemispheres is between emotion (in the right hemisphere) and cognition (in the left). I began by blowing that one out of the water fifteen years ago, as I am sure Hitchens is aware. It is a groundless myth that the left hemisphere is unemotional, reasonable, and ­reliable—quite the opposite, in fact, is true; equally, it is entirely wrong to imagine that the right hemisphere does not play a hugely important role in reason and science. The isolated right hemisphere is indeed largely dependable, ­whereas the isolated left hemisphere is often both intemperate and frankly deluded, facts I demonstrate at length. 

Nor would I wish a reader to imagine that I look askance at ­science and reason. As I am constantly reminded, my work depends heavily on both—hence the long (more than 180 pages) bibliography (mainly scientific papers); and I hold that in our age both science and reason are in need of defense, both from within the establishment by a too narrow and dogmatic understanding of each, and from without by political considerations that have no place in science, together with a sloppy form of postmodernism. Science and reason are precious lodestars, and we would be lost without them. I am fiercely protective of them. Ironically, it falls to someone who is devoted to both of them to point out their limitations as well as their proper strengths. It is irrational to believe that reason can answer all our questions, and it is unscientific to suppose that ­science can do so, either. To quote my own words, “two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold.” 

Turning to religion, in both ­science and divinity the deeper we go, the more we are confronted by paradox. We know it all to begin with, and as we progress the certainty of our knowledge recedes. On religion, I’d with reluctance accept that dogma might have a place, under certain ­circumstances, at certain times, and to a limited degree. I don’t want to be dogmatic about it. But I do believe that one’s first reaction, when the voice of religion becomes too certain about propositions, should be skepticism and a reasonable fear that in its certainty it strays further from the rarely explicit pathway toward truth. Many of the greatest minds in all the spiritual traditions of which I know a little characterize that path as, in some sense, “hidden” and mysterious, at least to the simplistic, full-frontal approach of our proceduralizing left hemisphere. Our understanding of everything, and a fortiori of something so complex as the divine, is a journey, a never-­completed process of deeper and deeper discovery, something always becoming and never fully finished to our hands. In science, new discoveries bring new questions and lead to the jettisoning of old certainties. That is the joy of it. And this is also the joy, in my humble experience, of the spiritual life. 

Iain McGilchrist
isle of skye, scotland

Thank you to Dan Hitchens for his wonderful article on Ian ­McGilchrist’s work on brain ­science. It was an excellent discussion of the duality that is necessary to remain sane in the natural world. We need both physics and metaphysics in equal measure. Bring on more articles describing scientists substantiating what philosophers and theologians already know about ­being human.

An area much in need of ­McGilchrist’s new story is American education. As a teacher, I’ve seen increasing emphasis on left-brain categorization: standards, test scores, and reading proficiency levels. Teachers and policymakers have more data than ever before. To be of any real use, those measurements need to be “re-integrated” ­into a more metaphysical mission for schools and colleges. Part of this mission needs to be rediscovering the joy in discovery, whether academic or personal.

As a nation, we need to articulate (and rearticulate) exactly what that mission should be. Using social science to make adjustments to the various components serves no one. The love of a subject area will go a long way in propelling proficiency on an exam. 

Mike Fitzgerald
syracuse, new york

Dan Hitchens replies:

Just to amplify Iain McGilch­rist’s remarks: His book is—among many other things—an utterly exhilarating tribute to ­science, partly because he doesn’t make an idol of it. And although my essay used The Origin of Species as a foil, ­McGilchrist’s treatment of Darwinism is fascinating and clearly based on a deep and sympathetic, even reverent, close reading of ­Darwin himself. 

As for dogma, I would argue that it is integral to the experience of truth in all its mysteriousness. As Frank Sheed observed, a mystery is something you can’t say everything about. It isn’t something you can’t say anything about. But given ­McGilchrist’s gracious words here I’m not going to belabor the point.

Many thanks to Michael ­Fitzgerald, who is, of course, spot on. Education is a prime candidate for a left hemisphere/right hemisphere analysis—from the curious child whose love of learning is crushed by a rigid curriculum to the professor who has mastered the higher-ed game but seems to have nothing wise to say.

The End of Something

R. R. Reno, while discussing Paul Kingsnorth’s 2024 Erasmus lecture, says that, although we should each be a “warrior who fights for the future of Western civilization,” Christ calls us to “be prepared to hate our mother and father, brother and sister. The same holds for Western civilization” (“Christianity and Civilization,” January 2025).

I trust that Reno does not mean that, if our family members or our fellow Westerners do not respond to our attempts to re-evangelize them, we should stand aloof from them as hopeless. Such was surely not Christ’s meaning: He responded to men’s rejection of himself by laying down his life for them; he calls us to do the same today. Part of that may include defending Western institutions that, when used well, do great good for humanity and the gospel, because they were built on sound principles with the help of grace (as Kingsnorth notes).

Christ calls Christians both to “be good citizens,” as Reno says, and to love the world ardently, as he himself did. Jesus says to the Father, speaking of his followers, “I do not pray that you should take them out of the world.” Christians are not to withdraw from sinners; they are to blend in among them, while not being of them. The Word himself did the same: When God’s kingdom seemed to have failed in the world, he took flesh and, like a grain of wheat, buried himself in the world to save us and change the course of history. If the present time seems far from God, Christians should engage in it more intensely, not recoil from it. Society may not change in our lifetimes, but our efforts will bear fruit, as Christ’s did, and our sufferings will be the cross that unites us with God, in preparation for eternal bliss. Trying to save civilization and trying to save our souls go hand in hand.

We are not “living through the end of something,” as Kingsnorth suggests, in a way fundamentally different from Christians’ past experience. A true Christian always lives in the end times: He is always putting an end to the old man in himself, so that his new man may shine forth. “Now” is always the best time in history, because now is our God-given opportunity to learn to love to the point of death, as Christ did. Now is the day of our salvation.

John F. Doherty
princeton, new jersey