First Things

1 week ago | firstthings.com | Micah Mattix

In a recent talk at the American Enterprise Institute, Dana Gioia remarked that “in the past half century, American conservatism has retreated from artistic culture.” He traces that retreat and notes:By the year 2000, rightly or wrongly, conservatives became associated with defunding, censorship, restriction, and complaint. The right seemed to be banning novels instead of writing them. It banned artwork rather than creating new visions of beauty that spoke more potently.

1 week ago | firstthings.com | Mark Bauerlein

__cf_bm1 hourThis cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management. __stripe_mid1 yearStripe sets this cookie to set a unique session identifier to recognize users across sessions. __stripe_sid1 hourStripe sets this cookie to set a unique session identifier for a single session.

2 weeks ago | firstthings.com | Bill McCormick

In choosing the name Leo XIV, our new Holy Father has set himself an urgent task: to diagnose the ills of our age and offer wisdom, as Pope Leo XIII did for his own time and beyond. As Russell Hittinger, the foremost contemporary scholar of Leo XIII, argues, Leo’s social teaching is in the service of “three necessary societies”: marriage and the family, polity, and the Church. They have necessary and enduring ends, and belonging to them is a key part of being human.

2 weeks ago | firstthings.com | Itxu Diaz

Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The vast stretches of farmland were overflowing with corn and fruit orchards. Here, in the house where I spent all the summers of my childhood, everything goes slowly; silence reigns far from the highway that crosses the north of Spain from east to west. The smell of furniture bent by humidity and the passage of time encourages reading and contemplation.

2 weeks ago | firstthings.com | Mark Bauerlein

Higher education is much in the news, assailed by the right and the left (for different reasons, of course), and held in low regard by the general population. A few new books have come across my desk that address the subject with a due sense of crisis and/or opportunity. “Don’t trust the Ivy League to produce well-educated students.” That’s the opening sentence of Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation.