Initially developed at the University of Toronto between the 1930s and 1970s, media ecology is a meta-disciplinary perspective that understands media as environments that shape human consciousness. Despite this expansive approach to media, media ecology has generally shied away from exploring that . . . . Continue Reading »
Years ago, I spent a month with my family in Burundi. I had once worked there when still single. During this visit, my daughter took French lessons from a local teacher in the small provincial center where we were staying. At one point, M. Jérôme, the teacher, asked her why Europeans give flowers . . . . Continue Reading »
Earlier this year, a Seattle-based journalist named Tariq Ra’ouf took to social media to explain the logic behind the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have been rocking American cities for months. “We are going to inconvenience every single person who doesn’t give a f**k until they give a . . . . Continue Reading »
On July 4, 1776, as several dozen sweating American colonists sat in the stuffy Pennsylvania State House wondering what would befall them for having dared to rebel against their king, a lone, hungry Spanish priest lay in the windswept stone plaza of a Hopi village wondering what would befall him for . . . . Continue Reading »
No two ways about it: We are making ourselves wretched. We are more affluent than ever, but riches—and power, the only point in having riches—do not make people happy. Ask a psychiatrist. Or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin, who has, alas, the power of life and death over . . . . Continue Reading »
Our culture is full of angry women—angry at misogynist men, angry that careerism hasn’t brought the fulfillment it promised, angry that they might get pregnant, angry when they don’t, angry at toxic masculinity, angry at the mental load, angry about a whole host of grievances. In a . . . . Continue Reading »
Anyone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 will remember the pitiable figure cut by the Eastern Bloc residents interviewed back then. They looked stunned, tongue-tied, disoriented, like rescuees emerging into the sunlight after days in a collapsed mine. Whether they were . . . . Continue Reading »
For a long time, what Alexis de Tocqueville called the American “spirit of freedom” was balanced by settled norms that guided young men and women toward domestic life. These norms added up to a sexual constitution that rested on the foundational assumption that men and women had different and . . . . Continue Reading »
A few months ago, I predicted that the Francis pontificate would seek to establish cordial relations with the Rainbow Reich. (See “While We’re At It,” January 2024, composed late November 2023.) In mid-December the Vatican issued the declaration Fiducia Supplicans, vindicating my . . . . Continue Reading »
How to describe what can’t beseen, invisible, yet universal,what is, has been, will always be,the Endless One, the cosmic forcewithout which nothing would exist,formlessness creating form,the mountain etched on open sky,the music score of notes and rests,silence giving shape to sound, asdarkness . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
