First Things

In 2026, three anniversaries coincide that together illuminate the enduring significance of religious liberty. Apart from marking two hundred and fifty years since the founding of the United States and a political order premised on liberty of conscience, free from government compulsion, it will also mark three hundred years since the Swedish Conventicle Act was introduced, an...

Robert Louis Wilken—radical Christian disciple, devoted husband and father, distinguished patristics scholar, elegant writer, serious baseball guy—died on June 6, a few months short of age ninety. Curiously enough, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of this longtime friend and colleague is a pop-quiz Q&A I heard years ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, where R...

Great Books are back on everyone’s mind. Christopher Nolan is making a film about one. Many fear a sacrilege—with good reason: Nolan is reported to approve of Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, after all. And another debate on the ...

In the fall of 1992, a Yale freshman named Jared Waxman wrote a letter to the editor of the Yale Herald. The Yale Freshmen Assembly had been held on August 29 of that year, and it began and ended with Christian hymns, including “We Gather Together,” a Calvinist doxology that has been sung in American churches since the Dutch colonists brought it over in the seventeen...

Novelists, playwrights, and historians, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (1822–1896 and 1830–1870) were also the supreme chroniclers of the Parisian literary and artistic life of their time. The diary that the brothers kept from the eve of the 1851 publication of their first novel (written in concert, like most of their works) appeared in nine volumes between 1886 and 1896. A vir...