First Things

It is said that Job lost everything, but she has lost more.

During marriage prep, my wife and I had to take the “Five Love Languages” test, a pseudoscientific test through which people “discover” how they prefer to receive affection.

Fjord, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or–winning film, is the kind of movie you desperately want to have a happy ending.

In the latest installment of the ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein, Scott Greer joins in to discuss his recent book, Whitepill.

I’m working on a memoir of my long-standing passion for climbing.

In 2013, I was one of five mothers who, unsatisfied with schooling options in MetroWest Boston, came together to found a Catholic classical school.

Few women loom as large as Elisabeth Elliot in the pantheon of American evangelical saints.

I learned a new word the other day: déploration.

Of all the titles I’ve been tracking this year, the one I am most delighted to have in hand is Henri Coulette’s New and Selected Poems, edited by Michael Caines and Boris Dralyuk.

On today’s episode, Meagan O’Rourke joins Virginia and Germán.

Karl Barth and the Idolatry of the Nation: Confronting Christian Nationalism by keith l. johnson baylor university press, 368 pages, $42.99 As the postwar era draws to an end, some Christians continue to reach for analogies to the 1930s.

Throughout the summer, I visited the National Gallery in London at least once a week.

Jan Morris: A Life by sara wheeler harpercollins, 432 pages, $37.50 Jan Morris (1926–2020) was a writer of astounding gifts who not only recorded history but made it.

During a Gaudium et Spes 22 podcast on the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas this past June, I said to my friend Larry Chapp, perhaps more flippantly than the subject warranted, that the folks leading the AI revolution “don’t know the difference between meta…

As the realistic English novel was emerging in a glorious birth amid the intellectual and moral tumult of the Enlightenment—the indomitable virtuous zeal of Samuel Richardson met at every turn by the irresistible hedonist zest of Henry Fielding—a very dif…

An old platitude of the cultural left is that sexual identity is innate.

Modern America worships at the altar of youth and eagerly tracks in polls and market research its latest and lightest velleities.

Father, I don’t think you should bring politics into religion.”

In the latest installment of the ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein, Bonnie Kristian joins in to discuss her recent book, In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers.

Philip Larkin joked in his poem “Annus Mirabilis”—an ironical reflection on the sexual revolution—that “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three . . . / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”

Many conversations about artificial intelligence end in a stalemate: A sentiment like “ChatGPT is awful because kids are using it as a therapist” runs up against “But it can also help us scan MRI images.”

The editors discuss the canceled livestreaming of the Nidal Hasan execution, the stench of corruption in the Trump administration, and the 100th anniversary of Michel Foucault’s birth.

Zoe Kazan’s seven-part Netflix adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden brings a woman’s sensibility to a man’s epic—for better and for worse.

It’s now 250 years since America declared her independence and embarked on the experiment of fashioning a nation dedicated to liberty.

Young women today have unrealistically high standards.

American Odyssey: What An Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls by patrick j. deneen creed & culture, 198 pages, $26 Who is our Odysseus?

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Michel Foucault.

Pope Leo XIV marked World Day Against the Death Penalty, observed on October 10, with the following message on X: The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.

Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America by scott greer passage, 264 pages, $34.95 There have been many books written about the online right and the Trump movement, most by people who are, to put it mildly, critical of them.

According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) was “an Italian-born businessman who was noted for his philanthropy and support of Jewish rights.”

For decades, Sweden had perhaps the most open immigration policy and the strongest commitment to tolerance and multiculturalism in the West.

In the latest installment of the ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein, Steven B.

Visiting Philippi on his second missionary expedition, Paul starts a riot.

At a semiannual conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, D.

It used to be that if you died horribly and honorably and happened to be a person of note, your legacy was secure.

Confusion over what it means to be human, and over whether human nature has an intrinsic moral shape, remains the source of much of our modern chaos.

Georgia Oakley’s new Sense and Sensibility film adaptation is a tragedy.

Is AI conscious, or could it ever be?

I am not usually given to apocalypticism, but I think I got the imagery exactly right when, in 2001, I called my brother and described the ruins left by the demolition of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium as akin to “the abomination of desolation” (cf.

For roughly a week in September, Jacob Coxon, an obscure researcher at AI giant Anthropic, was the most famous person on the planet.

The tech-rationalist phenomenon “SlutCon” caused quite a stir online, perhaps predictably.

A friend of mine asked a researcher at Anthropic whether Claude was conscious.

In the latest installment of the ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein, Leonard Sax joins in to discuss his recent book, Boys Adrift: The Six Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men.

This article will appear in the November issue.

We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it.

This article will appear in the November issue.

In his weekly catecheses on Vatican II, Pope Leo is now discussing Gaudium et Spes, one of the more controversial conciliar documents.

In this episode, First Things senior editor Dan Hitchens joins R.

Texas Public School Students Will Be Required to Read the Bible,” warned a headline in the New York Times in June.

In 1976, a freshman congressman from Illinois named Henry Hyde attached a single sentence to the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, declaring: “None of the funds contained in this Act shall be used to perform…