February 2020
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
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The Myth of Medieval Paganism
They don’t look very Christian—those strange faces made of leaves, and those women displaying cartoonishly enlarged genitals…
Letters
Protestant Theology I don’t suppose it will be easy for Carl Trueman (“Turning Inward,” December 2019) and…
Identity as Ideology
Like many persons possessing limited insight into the future, I had supposed that, with the collapse of…
An Affair of Things
Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going” depicts his experience when, out for a ride on his bicycle, he…
Homesick for Eternity
In 2018, Barack Obama urged his Facebook followers to read Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. We…
Private Faces in Public Places
If the stature of a poet is measured by how well his words stick in the reader’s…
Thirty Years at First Things
This is our 300th number, marking thirty years of publication. In early 1989, Richard John Neuhaus had…
Building to No Purpose
Together we can shape the future.” So proclaimed a construction fence poster at the gargantuan new Hudson…
Loving to Know
In many spheres, the question not just of what we know but of how we know is…
American Pilgrimage
We began just after daybreak. One by one, the brigades filed out of the parking lot, each…
Oppression by Indifference
Almost all Western democracies other than the United States provide public support to parents who wish to…
Fierce Loyalties
Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Churchby james chappel harvard, 352 pages,…
The World Turned Upside Down
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the Worldby tom holland basic, 624 pages, $32 After the Second…
Soul Proprietor
Are We Bodies or Souls?by richard swinburne oxford, 208 pages, $19.95 In the history of Western thought,…
Inherited Merit
The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Eliteby…
Civil War Catholics
The Civil War Diary of Rev. James Sheeran, C.Ss.R.: Confederate Chaplain and Redemptoristedited by patrick j. hayes…
Briefly Noted
Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinsonedited by timothy larsen and keith l. johnson ivp…
Via Negativa: Mourning Dove
Sightless in morning fog,she laces fallen fibers of fan palm, bunchgrass,the birch’s lost twigs, spins an empty…
Notre-Dame de Paris, by Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855)
Notre Dame is quite old: one will see it perhapsStill bury that Paris it saw at its…
Julian of Norwich in Seclusion
Because an anchoress could have a cat,We may assume she had one. That it satBeside her while…
Some Changed Same
In whitest skeletons the shadows of daydusk dim and, mantle-like, settle and layupon bristling grass and sleeping…
