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Bless This House
Prayers for the blessing of a house, adapted from this order of house blessing. At the doorway:…
Dawn After Evening
Pastor Rich Lusk of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, Alabama, points out that, narratively, the entire gospel of…
Death of a Country Priest
In this installment of the First Things Podcast, join associate editor Julia Yost, literary editor Matthew Schmitz,…
The Politics of Solidarity: A Case for the American Solidarity Party
During the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Notre Dame philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote an op-ed piece titled “The…
Words in Search of Meaning
Ben Lerner remembers his youthful play with half-understood words, and finds there a clue to the meaning…
Don’t Break My Name
Ben Lerner discovers the power of linguistic repetition in childhood games: “every kids know the phenomenon that…
Lonely Made Visible
In The New Yorker, Hanya Yanagihara situates photography among the arts: “if love belongs to the poet,…
Renunciation and Delight
Wise words, as usual, from Gilbert Meilaender: “Christians can . . . adopt and recommend no single…
Earth’s Oceans
A fascinating article in the Economist asks, What would we see if we could see through the…
Dickens Meets Dostoevsky
The TLS recently republished a delightful piece of literary detective work by Eric Naiman, first published in…
Are We Stupid about Smart?
“Smart” has become the encomium of contemporary culture, and the elevation of smart has real-world consequences. IQ…
Simplifying People
Louis, the dying, grasping, hateful narrator of Francois Mauriac’s Vipers’ Tangle believes the “tangle of vipers was…
After Reaganism: What’s Next for Traditional Conservatives?
“It’s the death of Reaganism!” This is the lamentation we hear from conservative intellectuals and activists dismayed…
Culture of Canaan
Leviticus 18 consists largely of rules on sex-permitted degrees of consanguinity, prohibited sex acts like homosexual sodomy…
Sad Tales of the Death of Kings
When Shakespeare’s Richard II disembarks in Wales, he learns that Henry Bolingbroke has usurped his throne and…
