This piece will appear in the November 2026 issue of First Things. How would you write a public letter that you know will become front-page news? Would you write it yourself, or would you have a team ...

We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it.” So William Hazlitt, in ...

In a life of reading, there are special times of wonder and delight. Books come into your hands that address your central concerns and discuss matters you’ve long pondered. But they do so in fresh and ...

Pundits tell us that we are moving beyond the culture wars. Left and right are merging in their common judgment that liberalism has reached a dead end. Something new is emerging. Maybe. My sense is ...

The Trump family’s exploitation of every opportunity to enrich themselves demoralizes me, as I’m sure it does many readers. Don Jr. and Eric Trump are the Uday and Qusay Hussein of our unhappy times, ...

On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother was euthanised against her will under Canada’s assisted dying system—she died covered ...

In this episode, Mark Regnerus joins R. R. Reno on The Editor’s Desk to talk about his recent essay, “Living Humanae Vitae in Poland,” from the October 2026 issue of the magazine.

Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore a pectoral cross (though both understood the dramatic possibilities of a cape). She sang “Jolene.” He ...

Has Elon Musk read the Odyssey? Despite the trillionaire’s endless carping about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Homeric poem, I have yet to see anyone ask this simple question. Musk has ...

The mother of a fallen Ukrainian soldier cries into the crucified Christ depicted on her son’s burial shroud. It echoes the icons here at St. Mikhail Church, a short walk from central Kyiv. As the ...

Many years ago, I wrote a piece for this magazine called “Grim Tales.” At the time, I was a young mother rediscovering the world of children’s literature, deciding what to read to my daughter and what ...

Imagine that you work as a janitor in the office building of a large corporation. One evening you encounter the distraught CEO standing on a window ledge. “Don’t jump!” you cry. “I’m free to do as I ...