First Things

In mid-September, I joined a lunch with the leaders of a village in Syunik, southern Armenia. The president of neighboring Azerbaijan has been threatening for several years to “return” this region to its “ancient” mother. (Azerbaijan was founded in 1918.) In practice, this would mean doing what Azerbaijan has already done to multiple regions of historic Armenia: expelling their Christian residents, bulldozing their churches and cemeteries, and filling them with Muslims and mosques.

Visiting Philippi on his second missionary expedition, Paul starts a riot. When he casts a python demon out of a young female soothsayer, her owners charge that he subverts Roman customs. A mob drags Paul and Silas through the streets, and city officials order them to be beaten, tossed into prison, and locked up in stocks. In the middle of the night, while Paul and Silas sing, an earthquake cracks the prison open, which leads to the famed conversion of the Philippian jailer.

It used to be that if you died horribly and honorably and happened to be a person of note, your legacy was secure. Amelia Earhart, John F. Kennedy, and Kurt Cobain were served well by their untimely deaths, remembered with more romance and fondness than if they had lived long enough to fade into obscurity. But, as with many things, the internet has changed that. Charlie Kirk died when the bullet hit his neck at Utah Valley University.

Confusion over what it means to be human, and over whether human nature has an intrinsic moral shape, remains the source of much of our modern chaos. This anthropological crisis first emerged as an existential concern in a Europe convulsed by two world wars. In retrospect, given the horrors of the occupation, it is not surprising that its most pungent intellectual expressions emerged in France among those who had matured under the Nazi jackboot.

Georgia Oakley’s new Sense and Sensibility filmadaptation is a tragedy. Not in the sense that it is bad. In fact, aside from Marianne’s scraggly hair and some weird interpretative dance interlude, it is thoroughly pleasant to watch. Shot entirely on film, the movie’s soft, warm lighting is especially delightful to see in this digital-camera age of drab grayness. But the film is a tragedy nonetheless, in the literary sense of the word: It refuses to capture Jane Austen’s comic vision of the world.

SlutCon’s Emotional Void The tech-rationalist phenomenon “SlutCon” caused quite a stir online, perhaps predictably. SlutCon was a multi-day retreat and… Romancing the Machine A friend of mine asked a researcher at Anthropic whether Claude was conscious. He replied, “Are you… How would you write a public letter that you know will become front-page news? Would you write…

Sally Thomas is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her books include a novel, a collection of short stories, two poetry chapbooks, and two full-length collections of poetry, including the newly released Among the Living, whose poems explore “the ordinary hours where faith and mortality meet.” With Micah Mattix, she edited the anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, which received the 2023 Book Award in Culture and the Arts from Christianity Today.

We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it.” So William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, registered his awe at King Lear, unapproachably sublime and unbearably terrible.

Texas Public School Students Will Be Required to Read the Bible,” warned a headline in the New York Times in June. The Texas State Board of Education had just approved a required reading list for K–12 schools in the state. The list in its current form prescribes a Bible passage or two in each grade.

Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death by kathleen stock the bridge street, 304 pages, $30 Imagine that you work as a janitor in the office building of a large corporation. One evening you encounter the distraught CEO standing on a window ledge. “Don’t jump!” you cry. “I’m free to do as I wish,” he replies. “Very well,” you say, “I respect your freedom, and I won’t physically restrain you.” “Help me!” he cries.