For quite a few years now, academic philosophers and sociologists, as well as popular social commentators who get paid to pronounce on such matters, have been telling us that people have been abandoning their formal personas in favor of the whims and behavior of their individual selves. The . . . . Continue Reading »
We Are the Change We Seek:The Speeches of Barack Obamaedited by e. j. dionne jr. and joy-ann reidbloomsbury, 376 pages, $25 The one thing we know about Barack Obama—at least, we think we know it—is that he is a great orator. From the moment he entered the nation’s consciousness in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Rerum Novarum (1891) begins with this sentence: “That the spirit of new things [revolutionary change], which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not . . . . Continue Reading »
Across the road from my house, presiding over a patch of lawn between my parish church and the old schoolhouse, there is a chestnut tree. I cannot say that the tree is particularly important to me; days can go by without my looking at it or taking any thought of it. And yet, if I turn my attention . . . . Continue Reading »
“All my brothers went West and took up land, but I hung on to New England and I hung on to the old farm, not because the paint mine was on it, but because the old house was on it—and the graves.” That’s what Silas Lapham tells a Boston journalist in the opening scene of William Dean . . . . Continue Reading »
Many regard Russia as backward, lagging behind the West. This is not so. Our shared civilization is changing, and because of our raw experience of the twentieth century, my country is in some respects ahead of the West. I have described the coming epoch as a new medievalism (“The New Middle . . . . Continue Reading »
What Benedict outlined in 2006 remains true eleven years later: In order to live in peace with “the rest,” Islam must find within its own religious and intellectual resources a way to affirm religious tolerance. Continue Reading »
Joss Whedon’s “Unlocked” tells a more complicated story about sex and abortion than he and Planned Parenthood must have intended. Continue Reading »
Peter Augustine Lawler died on May 23 at the relatively young age of 65, but he died in the hope of the Risen One and lives on in the lives he touched. Continue Reading »
Dispatches from the debate: Any left that is unable to see the way we are enslaved by lust will end up the unwitting handmaiden of those who exploit. Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
