HeyJaredPeter J. Leithart
- Indexed articles, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 25, 2026
- Outlet visibility, for First Things
- Top 500K sites
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 17, 2026
Latest articles
What Is A Nation? - First Things (opens the original)
Read excerpt
We think the political world is divvied up into nearly two hundred distinct nations, each with mappable boundaries, a unified political system, a shared language and culture, and a shared sense of being a nation. However various in details, we assume they’re the same kind of thing. That serves our purposes as a rough-and-ready picture of the world, symbolized by the blue-tinted obelisk overlooking Manhattan’s East River, but it doesn’t take much probing before it starts to dissolve. Whatever “na
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist - First Things (opens the original)
Read excerpt
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation could stand as a summary of Lagerkvist’s work. Lagerkvist, a lapsed Christian who won the 1951 Nobel Prize for Literature, described himself as a “believer without faith—a religious atheist.” Like his characters, he spent his life grappling with a God who never let him escape. In Barabbas, Lagerkvist extends the story of the brigand whom Pontius Pilate sets free while Jesus goes to the cross i
Natalism Will Smash the Gerontocracy - First Things (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Life expectancy has increased in the U.S., rising a decade since 1950 and three decades since 1900. Good thing, right? Not altogether, argues Samuel Moyn in his recent Gerontocracy in America. While the modern world celebrated youth, innovation, and novelty, we extended life spans and so inadvertently robbed the young of their chance to shine. An aging society preserves instead of progressing. The old unfairly hold down the young and hoard their inheritance while maintaining a death-grip on all
A Feast at the End of the World - First Things (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Margaret Kennedy—novelist, playwright, historian, critic—is having another moment. Feted and famous after the 1924 publication of her second novel, The Constant Nymph, Kennedy stopped writing novels during World War II, re-emerged afterward with a series of books that lasted nearly to her death in 1967, then faded from view, condemned to hover on the obscure edges of English letters with a reputation for being a middlebrow popular writer. Earlier this year, McNally republished two of her late no
Classics v. Classics - First Things (opens the original)
Read excerpt
The furious debate about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has revealed an unexpected fact: Many people take Homer seriously, very seriously. Modifying the canonical epic in the least detail, it appears, pushes our entire civilization to the edge of a cliff. For some, I suspect this seriousness is a recent acquisition, not to say a pose. Certainly they take Homer far more seriously than the classical tradition they claim to champion. Hollywood didn’t invent Homeric revisionism. Virgil inverted the ord
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
Top 500K sites
For First Things, the outlet · Measured Aug 1, 2026
Website popularity band, not a count of readers or article views.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.