Tomorrow, October 12, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged . It was a huge, hotly debated bestseller in its day, and its sales have held steady ever since. Its author, certainly, retains a certain mystique as the exacting thinker still revered by . . . . Continue Reading »
“Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran,” writes Alan Jacobs in the new issue of First Things . And weary grows the mind doomed to read it. The hours of my penance lengthen, The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine, And those hours may be numbered as . . . . Continue Reading »
Whatever one thinks about whether it is possible for Christian theology to be systematic—and there are good reasons to think not—we can at least say it is good manners to attempt to lay out everything one thinks in an orderly fashion.The brief dogmatics seems to have made a return to . . . . Continue Reading »
To my Fathers in Christ, the Catholic Bishops of Connecticut,I approach you, in the form of this letter, with a mind troubled by the words of your statement read at Mass in my parish on Sunday, September 30, regarding Plan B and the four Catholic hospitals in our state. Surely we, the lay faithful, . . . . Continue Reading »
It has been suggested to me that this wedding homily might be of more general interest. Perhaps you will agree. I might add that Gwyneth is the daughter of George and Joan Weigel. She and Robert are now serving medical internships at Johns Hopkins. In the Name of the + Father, and of the Son, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Imagine a book on Renaissance art without any pictures. And I don’t mean without illustrations, I mean without any pictures. No frescos by Michelangelo, Madonnas by Raphael, springtime scenes by Botticelli, or even woodcuts by Dürer. We might have a few fragments of a bit of a panel by . . . . Continue Reading »
On a trip to Crete last March to research onetime Venetian colonies, our class of twelve wandered into an Orthodox church in Chania. It was one of the many Cretan “double-nave” churches that, select art historians would argue, originated in Crete’s Venetian period, when both . . . . Continue Reading »
The recent publication of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., with its frank avowals of the struggles with darkness of someone widely regarded as a saint (and not just by Catholics), has raised once more the question of the role of doubt in the life of faith. Are faith and . . . . Continue Reading »
A longtime subscriber has more than a decade of past issues of First Things ¯but lacks the shelf space to hold them. Ideally, he’d like to donate them to a library and only asks to be reimbursed for postage. If you know of a place that could put these issues to good use, email us at . . . . Continue Reading »
No one can deny there is plenty of disagreement in the Anglican Communion, but right now straightforward confusion is carrying the day.Around the world, Anglican primates have been asking the Americans to provide the rest of the church with clarity about their position on gay bishops and same-sex . . . . Continue Reading »
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