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Luther’s Continuing Relevance
Readers of First Things may be interested in my review of a recent Morgan Library exhibition commemorating…
First Things: Food for the Soul
Every so often, our readers send us pictures of their small but discerning offspring chewing their way…
David’s Restraint, Yahweh’s Trap
When King Nahash of Ammon dies, David sends his condolences to his son Hanun (1 Chronicles 19).…
Strangers on a Train
The death of Nat Hentoff a couple of weeks ago was movingly memorialized for First Things by…
Sherlock’s Soap-Operization
Nicholas Barber gets Sherlock just right. Benedict Cumberbatch has the intensity to kill the title role, and,…
Thomas and Pure Nature
Summarizing a line of argument from Aquinas, Robert Spaemann (Essays in Anthropology) notes that Thomas acknowledges that…
Christ the Lion
Jesus is the Lion of Judah. This is no random metaphor, according to the medieval bestiary, the…
The Impossibility of Adulthood
Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (Nation of Rebels) characterize the 1999 film, American Beauty, as “a completely…
Frames and Frame-Breaks
Linguist and philosopher George Lakoff, co-author of Metaphors We Live By and many other works, wants to…
Battling Shakespeare
In an essay on “America’s Shakespeare” at National Interest, Algis Valiunas traces the shifting political of Shakespeare…
Origins of Atheism
Nick Spencer (Atheists: The Origin of the Species) doesn’t believe the standard creation myths about atheism. According…
Early Transhumanism
In his Eclipse of Man, Charles Rubin traces a genealogy of transhumanism. Among the sources is a…
Fr. Spadaro’s Math
It does not take a professional mathematician to spot the error in this recent tweet by Fr.…
David’s Plunder
David is no Achan. Achan was the Judahite who seized plunder from Jericho, booty that belonged to…
Are Trinitarian Persons Persons?
Boethius defined persona as an “individual substance of a rational nature (natuae rationalis individua substantia). This definition…
