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 ...

Texas Public School Students Will Be Required to Read the Bible,” warned a headline in the New York Times in June. The Texas State Board of Education had just approved a required reading list for K–12 ...

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… ...

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 ...

I recently lectured in Rome on the topic of the Antichrist. The Antichrist interests me for several reasons, mostly because nobody else is talking about it—which, for most of Christian history, would ...

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), ...

The following essay is adapted from Brad Wilcox’s just-released book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization. A Sociologist of Religion on ...

Jews familiar with Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) probably know him first as a hero, only then as a German-Jewish philosopher. His life and death are the stuff of legend. Born to an assimilated Jewish ...

My family’s beloved thirteen-year-old dog is named Keller. Every day he serves as a reminder of the ways that a certain Presbyterian pastor in New York City influenced me in the early stages of my ...

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 ...