The Viking History of Greenland
There was now much talk of looking for new lands.” This line from the thirteenth-century Icelandic Saga of the Greenlanders is an apt description of Washington, D.C., in 2026. The Saga of the Greenlanders…
February 2026
Print Edition
February 2026 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
The Failure of Bioethics
AI as Liberation
You can learn everything you need to know about our collective state of mind from the fact…
Mark Twain’s Religion
In 2014, when Kevin Malone’s opera Mysterious 44 premiered in Manchester, England, the production featured narrative voiceovers…
On the Pleasure of Admiring
The great essayist William Hazlitt observed that there is pleasure in hating. “Without something to hate,” he…
A Tale of Two Maybes
“Who knows, God may yet repent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we perish not”…
The First Things Podcast
Heritage and the Right
Conversations
How Science Trumped Materialism (ft. Michel-Yves Bolloré)
The Editor’s Desk
The Realities of Empire (ft. Nathan Pinkoski)
Against the Doctrine of Double Truth
The Viking History of Greenland
There was now much talk of looking for new lands.” This line from the thirteenth-century Icelandic Saga…
Of Roots and Adventures
I have lived in Ohio, Michigan, Georgia (twice), Pennsylvania, Alabama (also twice), England, and Idaho. I left…
The Madness in Miami
The great boxing spectacles of the past—the Thrilla in Manila (1975) and the Rumble in the Jungle…
The Making of the Activist Academy
While majoring in computer science at Columbia University, I took part in a poetry workshop. We were…
The Lonely Passion of Reginald Pole
A year after I became a Catholic, when my teenaged son was thinking about college, we visited…
In the Footsteps of Aeneas
Gian Lorenzo Bernini had only just turned twenty when he finished his sculpture of Aeneas, the mythical…
Cancer and the Cure of Souls
I have cancer,” the elderly woman announced from her hospital bed high above York Avenue in Manhattan.…
Can Liberals Be Pronatalists?
Last year the United Nations Population Division predicted that global population will peak in approximately sixty years,…
True Humans
The Catholic Church never condemned the theory of evolution nor came close to doing so. One might…
The Theology of Roe
A controversial abortion case reaches the Supreme Court, and men in black robes impose their religious views…
The Wallet
Oxblood, bifold, kept In a back bedroom Closet all these years, It dates to my time Of…
Another Madonna
Many may not notice the young rabbit, caughtin the thicket of brush near the bottom left-hand corner,…
Birdwatching
The people I want most to like all do it. I listen to their talk of swifts and…
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.…
