Pope Francis’s Muddled Mercy
Pope Francis began a Jubilee of Mercy in 2015, and now, in the aftermath of his death, “mercy” is the watchword in both the religious and secular reflections on…
June/July 2025
Print Edition
June/July 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
America’s New Grand Strategy
Leave Joy Alone
C S. Lewis has never been my favorite Christian writer. I admit this sheepishly, given his stature.…
How I Kicked My Phone Habit
About eighteen months ago, I decided I wanted a healthier relationship with my smartphone. My phone had…
An Evangelical in Italy
How does an evangelical—not joined with the Church in Rome, but committed to one holy, catholic, and…
Classical Renewal by Research
The research pursued these days in university humanities departments does not, as a rule, enjoy high esteem…
The First Things Podcast
The Popecast
Conversations
Law on Film
The Editor’s Desk
Women Without Men!
New York Deserves Better than State-Sanctioned Suicide
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
Rethinking Higher Education: New and Notable Books
Higher education is much in the news, assailed by the right and the left (for different reasons,…
Pope Francis’s Muddled Mercy
Pope Francis began a Jubilee of Mercy in 2015, and now, in the aftermath of his death,…
Genocide in Gaza?
The Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, was, according to British historian Andrew Roberts,…
How to Commemorate 1776
Next year is America’s 250th anniversary, and President Trump has promised us a “spectacular birthday party.” The…
Why Homeschool?
My father used to quiz us at the kitchen table, my older brother and me, during dinner.…
Francis in Full
By common consensus, Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio won the papacy by means of an intervention he made…
Defending the Christian Character of England
God is an Englishman:Christianity and the Creation of England by bijan omraniforum, 400 pages, £25 A couple…
Liberal Integralists
Eight years ago, Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State was described in these pages as “the…
Jesus After the Critics
Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesusby elaine pagelsdoubleday, 336 pages, $30 Quests for the “historical Jesus”…
Greetings on a Morning Walk
Blackberry vines, you hold this ground in the shade of a willow: all thorns, no fruit. *…
An Outline of Trees
They rise above us, arching, spreading, thin Where trunk and bough give way to veining twig. We…
Fallacy
A shadow cast by something invisible falls on the white cover of a book lying on my…
Jurassic Lark
How Fast Did T. rex Run?: Unsolved Questions from the Frontiers of Dinosaur Science by david hone…
Fighting the Noonday Devil
For most of the modern era, Christian apologists have emphasized the role of pride as the primary…
Jesus the Muslim Hippie
Many Christians and other non-Muslims who want to understand the Christ of Islam turn to the Qur’an,…
The Cross and the Machine
“Europeans didn’t only disinherit Aztecs and Incas. Continuously, since the sixteenth century, we have been disinheriting ourselves.”—John…
My Madness
My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165,…
Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button
All politics is local, as they say. And so, before we proceed to the big question of…
