First Things

April issue just dropped—and it’s been spotted in the East Village.

"The final passage of the 'Reminiscences' recalls what she had lost: 'His friendship was one of the best things I ever had and was of great use to me and I do not know of any harm it ever did me; I wish that mine had been of use to him, but it hardly could be, I had too little understanding.' This last judgment is surely mistaken." @johnschwenkler

"It is a remarkable thing, revealing her personal tenacity as well as her very deep love of philosophy, that Anscombe’s academic career survived those early years. Reading this book, it seems clear that her friendship with ­Wittgenstein was another one of the things that sustained it." @johnschwenkler

Living with Wittgenstein by John Schwenkler @johnschwenkler firstthings.com/living-with-wi…

"Most striking to me this time was how restaurants and cafes were generally not populated by people staring at their cell phones. Instead they were enjoying each other’s company. And the dinner table is yours for the evening, a place to sit and talk long after the meal is finished, a place to be human."

"For me, the annual trip to Rome is thus a time to step back and grasp once again something of the truly human. The city itself pulsates with humanity. It has avoided the homogenized skylines formed by the skyscrapers that dominate so many historic urban centers."

Lessons from the Eternal City by Carl R. Trueman firstthings.com/lessons-from-t…

“Strangely, as confidence in civilization craters, many like Ehrlich surrender all hope in the future. The kids call it ‘blackpilling’... Much the same attitude lies at the heart of not having children at all today. Lost in fleeting ambitions and pleasures, people cease betting on the future by having children.” @scottyenor

“Paul Ehrlich, noted author of The Population Bomb, died last week. Few people have been so consequentially wrong as Ehrlich... It is remarkable how this PhD in butterflies and Stanford professor rose to such prominence, capitalizing on a wave of popular pessimism to attack civilization from the left.” @scottyenor

Paul Ehrlich, False Prophet by Scott Yenor @scottyenor firstthings.com/paul-ehrlich-f…

“Burge’s book and the method underlying it are manifestly unequal to the task of understanding Christian faith and American politics. Not because evangelicals are blameless—they are not—but because Burge’s argument cuts too many corners. And in any case, whatever our politics or religion, the one thing we should agree on is that the Cold War mainline is not the solution to our problems. For better or for worse, there’s no going back.”

“At its best, Burge’s data-driven sociology of religion provides a limited but accurate snapshot of American faith—an infamously moving target. And Burge himself is at his best when he emphasizes those limits, avoids punditry, and accompanies the data with a range of plausible interpretations.”

Mainlining Nostalgia A review of Ryan P. Burge's The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us by Brad East firstthings.com/mainlining-nos…

“Instead, it may have more centrally to do with the far more extensive history of the laity’s participation in high-level ecclesial governance and discipline—beginning, say with that of St. Helena’s son Constantine, who convoked the First Council of Nicaea, which gave us our Creed, before he was even baptized.”

“Last week, the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith released a synodal study group’s final report on ‘The Participation of Women in the Life and Leadership of the Church.’ I was looking forward to the document’s engagement with Catholicism’s past as a source of wisdom for today... I was all the more disappointed, therefore, to discover that the report lacked basic historical grounding.”

The Women the Vatican Forgot by Bronwen McShea firstthings.com/the-women-the-…

"I will be presenting a highly selective and opinionated insider’s view of a boundless world that stands beyond the scope of any one peculiar lens."

"We might say that Jewishness possesses a 'family resemblance': each aspect recognizable, though none identical."