We welcome letters to the editor. Letters appear two issues after the article to which they are responding. Letters under three hundred words are preferred, and they may be edited for length and clarity.
Letters responding to articles published in this issue should be received by September 1 for publication in the November issue. Please send them to ft@evo.firstthings.com.
A Common Prayer
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal denomination struck a chord with me, a conservative member of a Reform Jewish congregation. His reason—the music and the liturgy (the Book of Common Prayer)—can be transposed to my appreciation of the choral music and use of an updated version of the Union Prayerbook, the dominant mid-twentieth-century prayerbook that has been discarded by almost all Reform congregations but ours.
I wish I could also say that my congregation leaves politics at the door, but that has not been the case.
Richard M. Kuntz
evanston, illinois
Digitas Telos
I appreciate Clement Harrold’s “How I Kicked My Phone Habit” (May 2025) for highlighting what is probably the most prevalent addiction out there. The best advice I’ve read is to treat your phone as what it is meant to be: a tool. When I pick up my phone, I ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” If it’s to text or call someone, check my email, read the news, add something to my schedule, shop for a gift, watch a movie on a flight, and so on, that’s a good use. If it’s to scroll for nothing in particular or to absentmindedly check the news, my emails, or social media for the twentieth time today, that’s not. As the psychologists say, “Awareness is curative.”
Brian P. Bialas
windham, new hampshire
Generation Betrayed
I completely agree with Liel Leibovitz’s “Battle For Young Minds” (May 2025), though it is much more than “men being abandoned by our culture.” The worst people are running our institutions—be it academia, the arts, science, entertainment, medicine, or government—and just by going back twenty years we can see that they have betrayed us all.
In 2008, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency seemed the final hurdle in our struggle with our ugly racist past. He seemed like a great example for us all. But as soon as he got into office, he turned on the country and, along with others in his administration, berated Americans for their supposed racism. Then, it was the ruling class’s dishonest and endless (and endlessly absurd) attacks on the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump and anyone even mildly supportive of him. Afterward, it was the calamitous and dishonest response to COVID.
Add to this our economic crisis (much the fault of Donald Trump) and the average young person knows that, through no fault of their own, things are horrible, and those in power are to blame. Young people are not willing to accept official explanations coming from who they consider to be culprits. Hence they turn to their peers in new media, many of whom are dangerously inflammatory and ignorant, yet also attractive, offering interesting and appealing explanations. As Leibovitz says, “we have a very big problem on our hands.”
Bob Sale
san diego, california
Policy and Progeny
Darel E. Paul’s “Feminism Against Fertility” (May 2025) offers a bracing diagnosis of declining birth rates and our culture’s growing estrangement from care and family. Yet by framing feminism as inherently anti-natal, Paul flattens a complex tradition and risks diverting attention from more constructive paths forward.
Most notably, Paul dismisses structural and economic factors as “marginal.” Yet the evidence from countries like France and Sweden strongly suggests otherwise. France, for example, has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe (1.83 children per woman in 2022), supported by a comprehensive policy network: generous maternity and paternity leave, subsidized child care, family allowances, and housing supports like the APL. Sweden, with a fertility rate of 1.66, offers 480 days of paid parental leave, shared flexibly between parents, and near-universal affordable childcare. Studies by the OECD and the Stockholm University Demography Unit confirm that these policies reduce the opportunity cost of childbearing, particularly for working mothers.
Of course, these policies do not eliminate deeper social currents. Fertility in both countries remains below replacement level, and economic anxiety, shifting life goals, and evolving norms around gender all play significant roles. Still, the relative success of these models demonstrates that demographic renewal demands more than cultural critique—it requires institutional imagination and political will.
Paul’s argument also gives insufficient attention to male agency. By locating the problem chiefly in women’s autonomy, the analysis becomes imbalanced. Men, too, have withdrawn from family formation and must be called to responsibility. Any cultural recovery of care and kinship must involve both sexes.
Finally, while the article gestures toward a Catholic concern for relational goods, it stops short of articulating a theological anthropology of motherhood, fatherhood, and human dignity. A Christian vision of life cannot be built on resentment. It must propose a credible alternative—one marked by generosity, mutual responsibility, and the joy of shared vocation.
France and Sweden do not refute Paul’s concern, but they complicate it. Fertility is not simply a battlefield in the culture war; it is a matter of human ecology—and it calls for both cultural conversion and structural courage, even with its risks to political capital.
George Cervinka
quebec, canada
Darel E. Paul replies:
George Cervinka offers several insightful comments and critiques in his letter. I’d like to respond to three of them.
Whether or not “feminism” is “inherently anti-natal” is a matter of semantics. From a demographic perspective, there is no doubt that feminism is a low-fertility ideology and that gender egalitarian practices produce lower-fertility societies. The fundamental question is, “How low?” If, as I suggest, such a social order produces a fertility rate more like 1.4 than 2.1, we have a society that cannot persist regardless of what words we use to describe it.
Cervinka points to France and Sweden as successful examples of gender egalitarian fertility and family formation policies. As I have written elsewhere, such stories are not as rosy as they appear. Both French and Swedish period fertility has been in decline for a decade and in freefall since 2022. More significantly, cohort fertility is also in decline across the Nordic states, indicating this is not a temporary phenomenon. Across the OECD countries, the price of daycare is positively correlated with fertility (lower prices, lower fertility), quite the opposite of what we would expect. Before the Great Recession, the United States had one of the highest fertility rates in the Western world, without any of the family-friendly policies of France and Sweden. Family policies are good on their own, but we shouldn’t believe they will make a large impact on demographic trends.
Finally, I agree with Cervinka’s point regarding male agency. I highlighted female agency, however, for two reasons. First, the dominant narrative on gender and family formation is some version of “men are terrible,” thus I felt data on female reluctance and disinterest needed to be highlighted. Second, in the twenty-first-century West, women have more agency than men on the matter of fertility and family. Simply stated, their decisions matter more. Cervinka is quite right that our society is in need of cultural conversion. I sought simply to describe how daunting a barrier our current values and practices are to such a conversion.
Girl Talk
I found Freya India’s “The Right Has Forgotten Feeling” (May 2025) a very insightful article from a perspective almost totally the inverse of my own. I am a young woman who has spent my entire life deeply involved in the Catholic Church, and I am very grateful for the meaning and community it has given me and the hurt it has saved me. I am happily unfamiliar with many of the experiences that India describes as part of the lives of women today. Unfortunately, some of the issues she describes are far from exclusive to secular culture. One of these is a tremendous distrust of intuition. In the mostly conservative Catholic circles I move in, the word “feeling” is mocked if brought up in a discussion. Truth is to be found by argument, preferably supported by quotations from Thomas Aquinas. Intuitions, emotions, or feelings are considered irrelevant to discussions at best and diabolical temptations at worst.
Another tendency that frustrates me is the focus on ministry to boys while girls are largely left to work through issues on their own, without female social groups or support. The idea that girls form healthy identities and social networks without help or direction has not held true in my experience. In spite of these problems, I am very grateful for the community I am part of, especially for the effects it has on the young men I know, who my female friends and I – affectionately refer to as “our boys.”
In the past few years, I have come to realize how unusual it is to have a church where the norm is for boys to be interested in their faith, courteous to their female friends, and actively trying to resist the widely accepted vices of our society. The cool things for them are to altar-serve and talk about cars, hunting, and incense after Mass. Although the needs of young women are not always perfectly addressed, we are always told how much we are worth. On the very day I read this article, while I said goodbye to my boyfriend, he hugged me tightly and told me how infinitely valuable and precious I am in God’s eyes, and that God’s perspective is the only one that truly matters. I came home that evening to find flowers on my doorstep. If “by their fruits you shall know them,” then the men that communities of faith —as opposed to secular culture—produce are witnesses to the change that belief works in people. I hope that more of the young women that India describes will come to find, first, the love of God in the Christian faith and, then, the genuine love that they have not found from secular men.
Hope Poglitsh
wasilla, alaska
Thanks to Freya India for her insightful article. As conservative Christians, we have to remember that orthodox Christianity is built on the grave of the Gnostics. Christian pistis is infinitely closer to feeling and intuition than to that secret, hidden knowledge. And we have generations of young women who haven’t “seen,” but need to believe. Thomas is the proof. No matter how much we attest to these girls that “conservatism is ‘rizzin,’” if they can’t feel it, no logic, no socioeconomic or sociological miracles, no fiery sermons telling these girls that they’re breaking the world instead of being broken by it will rescue the right from this feminist funk. Conservatism is feeling couched in rationality in much the same way that wokeism is inanity masked with feeling. We just have to tap into that zeitgeist and translate conservatism’s “obvious” advantages into a language young women can understand. Easier said than done? Freya’s given us the diagnosis; now we need her on cultural triage.
Isaac Misner-Elias
benton, maine
Sacred Science
There is a terrifying vulnerability that comes with putting anything in writing, and writing a book is maybe the most petrifying gambit of all. For a scholar of the humanities, to write a book that ventures to speculate about science and its implications is to know what Philippe Petit must have felt like doing his high-wire act between the Twin Towers. You can run your drafts by as many expert friends as possible, but until the thing goes to press, you never shake the feeling that one wrong move could leave you plummeting to a painful and conspicuous intellectual death.
I say this to account for the enormity of my gratitude (not to say relief) when the distinguished physicist Stephen M. Barr wrote such a gracious, insightful, and positive review (“Immaterial World,” May 2025) of my book Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science through Faith. Barr relays my arguments beautifully and grapples with them incisively even though I am, as he gently notes, “Not the most obvious candidate . . . to write a book about science and faith.” That’s putting it mildly!
I did it because I believe we are at a critical juncture in the history of the West. Non-specialists badly need to become conversant in what science really does and doesn’t imply philosophically and theologically, so they don’t get hoodwinked by the impresarios of materialism. Technologists need even more badly to take the humanities seriously, so that they learn what it is about us that can’t be hacked away or replicated in code. That, in essence, is what the book is about. Scientists and non-scientists desperately need an intellectually satisfying common language in which they can speak to each other (rather than down to or past each other) about the things that matter.
There is of course a rich Catholic tradition of such dialogue, which is why I particularly appreciate the extra citations Barr adduces from Pope Benedict XVI, alongside physicists like Eugene Wigner, to supplement my argument. I also appreciate him pressing me to consider further the distinction between intellects and intelligible things—a subject that is beyond the scope of this letter, but that will definitely inform how I think about these matters going forward. In any case, I thank Stephen Barr and First Things for reassuring me I wasn’t crazy to walk out on the high wire.
Spencer Klavan
claremont institute
upland, california
