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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

As a proud “Reagan Democrat,” I felt blessed to be in Berlin a few days after the Wall fell in November 1989. I will never forget the sight of the Wall’s death strip or the blight and stench of ...

Here’s a simple, biblical truth: We’re never as smart as we think we are, and we’re never as wise as we need to be. The best intentions can have unintended consequences. I remembered this recently ...