In December 2023, Michael Cassidy, a Navy veteran and devout Christian, encountered an obscene statue of Baphomet erected by the Satanic Temple inside the Iowa Statehouse. He tore it down. For this act of what he described as spontaneous “Christian civil disobedience,” he was quickly charged . . . . Continue Reading »
Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” illustrates how many parts of American society treat the unborn. Continue Reading »
I very much enjoyed Armin Rosen’s essay about the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (“Tarkovksy’s Sublime Terror,” October 2023), but I’m afraid he has made an error of fact about Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. Rosen says the protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, “swallows poison and then . . . . Continue Reading »
There is little space in the Christian ethic for the brutish “strength” of a Tate-esque masculinity. On the contrary, Christianity requires precisely weakness. Continue Reading »
It is intriguing to ask exactly how and why a particular positive idea of paganism became embedded in skeptical and secular discourse—and embedded so deeply, in many cases, that there seems little chance of public education dispelling it. Continue Reading »
The right pagan philosophers, above all the moral philosophers, can teach us how to escape from the prison of the body’s passions. Continue Reading »
First Things brings articulate, committed believers together across confessional divides. Continue Reading »
We must have been fifteen or sixteen when we discovered the church visitor’s book. It was an old church, maybe medieval, and I would pass it with my school friends on our way to the town center. I’m not sure what possessed us to go in; it might have been my idea. I’ve always loved old . . . . Continue Reading »
They don’t look very Christian—those strange faces made of leaves, and those women displaying cartoonishly enlarged genitals on the walls of medieval churches. Most people who have explored the medieval architecture of Western Europe have heard a tour guide explain that a particular carving . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1768, John Wesley expressed concern about the decline of popular belief in witchcraft and the supernatural: “The English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as mere old wives’ fables. I am sorry for it. . . . They . . . . Continue Reading »
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