First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life articles

Recent articles from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life

Choose your own narrative.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2009... The main problem with George Weigel's evaluation ("A Campaign of Narratives," March 2009) of the recent presidential election--besides the blindness due to his own involvement in supporting and rationalizing Bush's tragic, do-it-on-the-cheap war in Iraq and how that misdirected expenditure of...

Europe's nightmare.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2009... Jean Bethke Elshtain's "While Europe Slept" (May 2009) seems to embrace Leo Strauss' insight that the secret of the vitality of the West is the irreducible tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The West, in this view, has two wellsprings: Greco-Roman philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion....

Two paths to freedom.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2009... Bravo to Anthony Esolen ("The Freedom of Heaven & the Freedom of Hell," March 2009). No one knows better than a translator that Dante was as transcendent a poet as he was a deeply learned theologian and metaphysician. It is sad to reflect on the experience of those whose college exposure to...

Jews and gentlemen.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2009... It is astonishing to read, in a journal bearing the title FIRST THINGS, Joel Schwartz's "Israel's Defense" (March 2009), which thinks of the moral implications of the Lebanon and Gaza invasions as if they were mere matters of relative failures in public relations. How, moreover, could...

Deep down things.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2009... Many thanks to Richard Mouw ("Surprised by Calvin," March 2009) for correcting impressions of a dour Reformed tradition. With his supporting citations from Catholic sources, I could not help but think of Gerard Manley Hopkins, "the dearest freshness deep down things." But then, too, of...