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 ...

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 ...

During the fall semester of 2013, I began to teach a new course here at Yale: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Even though the course had no track record (and therefore no student evaluations), ...

St. Paul’s Cathedral has come up with a novel way to fill the pews: It is becoming a concert venue. Under a newly inked agreement, London nightclub Fabric will be the “exclusive partner for ...

In his Apologia ad Carolum Quintum, English cardinal Reginald Pole claimed that Thomas Cromwell told him in 1529 that Machiavelli’s The Prince had inspired King Henry VIII to break with Rome. The ...

On the night he was elected president, in November 2008, Barack Obama addressed a throng in Chicago and declared that America had been made over the course of “221 years—block by block, brick by brick ...

Leslie Poles Hartley famously dubbed the past “a foreign country.” This summer, for the first time, I sensed that the present can be one too. My annual visit to the land of my childhood and youth ...

For conservative Christian nerds it is a hammer blow. Imagine the grief and shock if Taylor Swift were to announce that she was giving up songwriting to focus on her acting career, and you will have ...

The fall of Cambridge wunderkind Jason Arday was the British press story of the summer. To any perceptive onlooker, his tall tales of overcoming numerous impossible odds to scale the highest heights ...

Contrary to online chatter, we are not in a “Catholic moment.” But we may already be in an evangelical century. Significantly more people are leaving Catholicism than converting to it. By contrast, ...

Frequent confession was once normal—monthly, biweekly, or even weekly. But it became rarer among Catholics formed from the 1970s through the 1990s. Today, many Catholics go to confession only after ...