Prisoners of Our Own Devices
To Arrive Where We Started:Belonging in the Modern World by ian marcus corbinyale university press, 200 pages, $32.50 Ian Marcus Corbin’s new book, To Arrive Where We Started, offers a…
June/July 2026
Print Edition
June/July 2026 Print Edition
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
The Education of Cole Tomas Allen
A Dreadful Humility
At some point we must give up trying to understand other people. Love them, surely. But recognize…
Scout’s Honor
My six-year-old son wants to join the Scouts, but I have mixed feelings. As an Eagle Scout,…
Why I Became Orthodox
Bulbous onion domes topped the Corinthian columns, and baroque stucco architraves lit up the drowsy city toward…
Our Strange Catholic Moment
American Catholicism is in steep decline. In 2000, 2.6 million American children attended Catholic schools. In 2025,…
The Twisted Consequences of Chatbots
How Trump Betrayed the Pro-Life Movement
Several weeks after the 2016 election, Marjorie Dannenfelser received a voicemail from President-Elect Donald J. Trump. Her…
The Holdfast Sanctity of Sigrid Undset
When I traveled to Norway for the first time, I was already a devoted reader of Sigrid…
Prisoners of Our Own Devices
To Arrive Where We Started:Belonging in the Modern World by ian marcus corbinyale university press, 200 pages, $32.50…
Lena Dunham Sticks the Landing
Famesick:A Memoirby lena dunhamrandom house, 416 pages, $32 If offered the choice, how many of us would…
Where America Is
This symposium will appear in the August/September issue of First Things. The United States of America dates…
Paul Celan’s Via Negativa
In the twentieth century the messengers shot themselves. Most did so metaphorically, of course, though a few…
Catholics and Modern Anti-Semitism
For certain personalities, drugs such as methamphetamine have an almost irresistible appeal. Only later does it turn…
Delicious Longing
One day around 1836, in the ancient city of Dijon, the young French poet Aloysius Bertrand was…
Has Freya India Cracked the Commodification Problem?
The myth of Narcissus tells of a beautiful young man’s obsession with his own image, captured in…
Liberalism Is Christianity’s Prodigal Child
Something of a shift in the landscape is signaled when a press like Polity releases, almost simultaneously,…
Birds
I wait for themthis dark spun dawn,kinglet, titmouse, nuthatch, wren,names so sweet on winter’s frozen tongue,such feathered…
Irises
Only he could see them clearly: the wayThey curl their shadows close beneath their leaves, Cupping clefts of…
Tool and Toy
When you select the proper tools to use,favor those that make delightful toys,like whistling tops driven by…
Our American Babylon
Once upon a time—it was the 1976 bicentennial of the American founding, to be precise—I wrote a…
A Nation Under God
Our country has a long tradition of official encouragement of religion on a non-sectarian basis. That tradition…
America’s Two Foundings
Contrasting judgments often arise from studying the Niagara of words that justified the American War for Independence—together…
The Faith of the Founding
My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Walter Berns, has written that the philosophy of John Locke…
Self-Evident Truths and American Independence
One of the common reactions of the British to the American Declaration of Independence was astonishment at…
The Bible Cause at 200
Two hundred years ago this Spring, on May 11, 1816, representatives from local Bible societies around the…
