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Published by The Institute of Religion and Public Life, First Things is an educational institute aiming to advance a religiously informed public philosophy.
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Pope Leo's Unified Church
3+ day, 16+ hour ago (76+ words) Image by Sipa USA via AP. Germán S. Díaz del Castillo is associate editor at First Things. Virginia Aabram is newsletter editor at First Things. Several weeks after Islamist terrorists hijacked four planes, wreaking havoc in lower Manhattan and at…...
A Catholic Moment or an Evangelical Century?
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (444+ words) Contrary to online chatter, we are not in a “Catholic moment.” But we may already be in an evangelical century. The previous “Catholic moment,” lasting from 1995 to 2002 by Bottum’s reckoning, failed to fill the Mainline Protestant void. Rather, the post-Protestant…...
Who Gets Custody of the Latin Mass?
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (280+ words) First Things Who Gets Custody of the Latin Mass? In any messy breakup, there are the inevitable conflagrations over custody of the kids, the dog, the vinyl collection. The parting of ways between the Catholic Church and the Society of…...
The Pope and the Antichrist
1+ mon, 4+ week ago (262+ words) It is not my place to tell the Church what time it is. Benedict already did that, as this essay, which I wrote with my friend Sam Wolfe, attempts to show. My humble hope is that others might succeed where…...
Schism by Design
2+ mon, 1+ week ago (780+ words) First Things And so it has happened. The Society of St. Pius X has gone ahead with its illicit ordination of four new bishops, and the Vatican has responded with the expected announcement that the act is schismatic, incurring the…...
In Memoriam: Robert Louis Wilken
3+ mon, 3+ day ago (221+ words) During all the years of our friendship, neither of us ever engaged in even covert proselytizing. We were constantly discussing what our two respective traditions have in common, while never losing sight of what divides them. We will miss him....
The Calculated Spectacle Behind Magnifica Humanitas
3+ mon, 4+ day ago (540+ words) The first encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIV has been engaged widely on its substance, but its manner of presentation was also noteworthy—and likely contributed to how much attention it received. Those questions will eventually get asked, and it…...
John Paul II and America
3+ mon, 1+ week ago (147+ words) As America approaches its 250th birthday, it would do well to remember that the emblematic figure of the second half of the twentieth century had such high hopes for us: hopes that now seem a call to a national examination of…...
In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo Defends the Human Person
3+ mon, 2+ week ago (711+ words) “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”—Psalm 8:4 But the deeper subject of the encyclical is not artificial intelligence. It is the human person and his definition. That is the question beneath every contemporary debate about AI, even…...
The Peace We Can Make
3+ mon, 2+ week ago (274+ words) Repetition, it’s said, can be the mother of learning. So, in light of recent Catholic debates about the pursuit of peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, permit me to reprise, with slight adjustments, parts of a column from twenty-four…...