The following is an excerpt from the first edition of The Fourth Watch, a newsletter about Catholicism from First Things. We invite you to subscribe by clicking here. The Fourth Watch, authored by James F. Keating, will come to your inbox twice a month.
Let me introduce you to The Fourth Watch, a newsletter from First Things. For those who do not catch the admittedly obscure biblical allusion, the fourth watch refers to the stretch between 3 and 6 a.m. when the night is darkest and dawn, while soon to break, is most in doubt. We are told that it was during this time that the disciples, caught in a sea storm and at the point of losing hope, glimpsed Jesus walking toward them as one who commands the howling winds and the watery depths (Mark 6:48). The story is both testimony to Jesus’s divinity and an exhortation to the Church where she must look in times of maximal distress and despair. Our hope is not in our poor powers, but in the Lord.
The Fourth Watch seeks to alert its readers to the various issues of the moment, including the tempests that threaten St. Peter’s Barque to the point of sinking. It will not, however, provide yet another occasion for doomscrolling. Just as there are dark things happening in our world, there are also signs of impending dawn. The accent will be on the hope the God revealed in Jesus Christ provides. Readers will be pointed to commentary from First Things and elsewhere that offers acute analysis of our present storms and, whenever possible, a path through them.
I begin with a familiar trope of bemoaning the state of youth today. I am a college professor and have been teaching undergraduates for over twenty-five years. Accordingly, I have had a front-row to the well-documented decline in basic skills of reading, writing, and speaking. For many of my compatriots in the humanities, few things bring more pleasure than chronicling how little our students know about history, how little they read, how few words they know, or how unwilling they are to consider opinions at odds with their own. It’s a form of gallows humor for those of us paid to lead students through challenging texts, philosophies, and works of art. It is untoward that we complain so, since we neither crave nor are capable of other work. And yet, that fact does not change the basic truth of the challenge we face. Our students do not arrive at college prepared to do the work previous generations did . . .
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