Voyages to the End of the World
Francis Bacon dreamed of abolishing disease, natural disasters, and chance itself. He also dreamed of abolishing God.
October 2025
Print Edition
October 2025 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
The Epstein Myth
The Substance of Our Lives
While I was in college, the local priest got me to come along with him on his…
The Right to Be Killed
In the days surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., leaders of the civil rights movement…
No Chosen, No “Almost Chosen”
Mazal tov! Partisans on the left and on the right, fighting bitterly for a larger swath of…
Paul’s Ethnic Gospel
Grace, not race”—so goes the tidy maxim by which many modern interpreters characterize Paul’s gospel. In this…
The First Things Podcast
Pope and Parliament
Conversations
The Church’s Answer to the World (ft. Carter Griffin)
The Editor’s Desk
Faith in State Politics (ft. Cameron Sexton)
A Turning Point for America
Course-Correcting the Sexual Revolution
Victims of the Revolution:How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us Allby nathanael blakeforeword by ryan t andersonignatius press, 272…
An Important Civics Lesson, Well Taught
The permanent exhibit in the rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., includes original copies of…
The Lost Art of Saying “No”
Conservative pundit Matt Walsh recently contended that “we have to recapture the long-lost art of saying ‘no.’”…
Undermining the Church’s Public Witness
Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki recently wrote in these pages that the Archdiocese of Chicago’s plan to grant…
Voyages to the End of the World
Francis Bacon dreamed of abolishing disease, natural disasters, and chance itself. He also dreamed of abolishing God.
The Cambrian Implosion
A historical moment ago, it was too obvious for words, but: Life is a blessing. So to…
Finding Private Roy
By the late 1970s, when I attended public high school in rural, blue-collar Central New York, more…
Contained Controversy
To describe the shifting relationship between religion and art, we must use the broad brush. Judaism and…
Politics for Losers
In a 2002 essay, Christopher Caldwell—perhaps the premier conservative journalist intellectual writing today—paid a memorable compliment to…
Bright Girdle Furled
Light on Darkness restores liturgy to its place at the heart of the medieval world. Like a…
Madonna and Child
First Place — 2025 First Things Poetry Prize
Not Versed in Country Things
Second Place — 2025 First Things Poetry Prize
For the Finders of Bodies in Murder Mysteries
Pray for her now, the cleaner arriving at dawn, unlocking, humming idly as she dusts till a…
Empathy is Not Charity
Martin Scorsese’s recent film Silence, like the historical novel by Shūsaku Endō on which it is based,…
The Sacred Heart of Victor Hugo
The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables By Mario Vargas Llosa Princeton University Press,…
The Whole World Groans
St. Jerome, angry over the protracted Arian crisis and the apparent victory of the “semi-Arians” at the…
Christianity and Poetry
I When I became a man, I put away childish things.—St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13 Most Christians…
My Madness
My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165,…
Shakespeare, Four Centuries On
This Saturday, April 23rd, marks an important anniversary: four hundred years since the death of William Shakespeare.…
