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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It used to be that if you died horribly and honorably and happened to be a person… ...

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 ...

Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Rev. 2:11). This passage from Scripture is frequently quoted to justify a so-called “synodal Church,” a concept that at ...

The memories are still vivid, even though it was a long time ago. Having been born in 1956, I’m just old enough to remember the confusing and tumultuous era of “the changes” that came after the Second ...

Madi grew up in a religious home, blessed with attentive parents who took the dangers of technology seriously. They installed filters on her devices and required her to hand in her phone every night.

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), ...

Before London was a global city, it was just a city, and people lived there. Across its two-thousand-year history, London has always had a working class. In the sixteenth century, that class acquired ...

Imagine if a cardinal of the Catholic Church were to publish an article in which he condemned “a theology of eucharistic coherence that multiplies barriers to the grace and gift of the eucharist” and ...

Why has the murder of Charlie Kirk resonated so powerfully through the culture? Is it because he was cut down so brutally in his prime? That he left behind a wife and two very young children? That no ...