First Things

What First Things is

First Things is the monthly magazine of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, a New York–based nonprofit founded by Father Richard John Neuhaus in 1990. Its founding mission — which it still recites — was to advance "a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society." In practice that has meant publishing essays, reviews, and editorials on theology, philosophy, law, politics, culture, and the arts, written by religiously serious thinkers across several traditions.

The magazine publishes ten print issues a year alongside a constantly updated website. The web side runs daily "Web Exclusives" — shorter pieces, often topical, that do not appear in print — plus the full magazine archive, a podcast, a newsletter, and event listings. The Institute also hosts lectures and fellowships, but for most readers First Things means the website and the magazine.

Why religiously serious readers keep coming back to First Things

The thing First Things does that almost no other Christian publication does is publish writers from different confessional homes in the same issue without watering any of them down. A typical month might run a Catholic Thomist arguing for natural-law personalism, a Reformed political theorist pushing back on the same essay, a Jewish writer reviewing a new book on covenant, and an Orthodox priest writing on liturgical aesthetics. They are not pretending to agree. They are arguing as adults inside a shared editorial commitment to taking religion seriously as a public matter.

This is what the magazine means by "ecumenical-conservative." Ecumenical, because the contributor bench really does cross traditions. Conservative, because the editorial sensibility — skeptical of secular liberalism, attentive to tradition, formed by classical and Christian humanism — runs through the whole project. Readers who share that sensibility find a home; readers who do not will notice the frame from page one. Both reactions are correct readings of what the magazine is.

The ecumenical-conservative contributor bench

The masthead and the regular-contributor list are the asset that distinguishes First Things from every adjacent publication. Editors and senior writers over the years have included Catholics (Neuhaus himself, George Weigel, R. R. Reno, Robert Royal), Reformed Protestants (Carl Trueman, Peter Leithart), Eastern Orthodox voices (David Bentley Hart, Rod Dreher in his Orthodox years), evangelicals (Mark Galli, Mark Noll, Robert Louis Wilken before his reception into Rome), Jewish writers (Yuval Levin, David P. Goldman, Meir Soloveichik), and a long bench of academics from law schools, divinity schools, and philosophy departments. The contributor list reads like a who's who of religiously serious public intellectuals in the United States.

In practice this means you get arguments inside the magazine, not just arguments around it. A Reformed contributor will critique a Catholic essay, a Jewish contributor will push back on a Christian reading of Hebrew Scripture, an Orthodox writer will object to a Western framing of the Trinity. The disagreements are real and the editing is good enough that the disagreements stay civil. For readers who want to feel intellectually outnumbered in a useful way — surrounded by people smarter than them from traditions other than their own — there is nothing else quite like it on the American religious scene.

Long-form essays and cultural commentary that respect the form

A typical print issue carries six to ten essays, three or four shorter columns, a clutch of book reviews, and the back-page editorial. Essays usually run 3,000 to 6,000 words. Reviews are real reviews — the writer has read the book, engaged the argument, and is willing to disagree. Cultural pieces cover film, fiction, classical music, opera, architecture, and visual art, all treated as theological objects rather than entertainment. The standing columns — Reno's editorials, the "While We're At It" miscellany at the back — are the closest thing the magazine has to recurring features.

The web side adds a faster cadence: daily Web Exclusives running 800 to 2,000 words, plus the "First Thoughts" blog for shorter commentary. The web pieces are less formal than the print essays but still edited; you will not find unfiltered hot takes. For readers who feel that the rest of the religious internet has been reduced to thread-length argument and outrage cycles, First Things is one of the few sites that still believes a 4,000-word essay is a reasonable thing to publish on a Tuesday.

Magazine, web, and podcast — three formats, one editorial voice

The print magazine is the flagship and arrives ten times a year. The website hosts the full magazine archive (back to 1990), the daily web essays, and topical collections. The First Things Podcast — usually hosted by an editor with a rotating slate of guests — runs weekly and tends to track what is happening in the magazine, with episodes on the latest cover essay, an interview with a contributor, or a longer conversation on a current controversy. There is also a free newsletter that surfaces the week's pieces.

The cross-format consistency is the point. A reader who finds an essay in the magazine can pull the audio episode that unpacks it, then read three follow-up Web Exclusives that respond to the controversy it stirred. The Institute treats the formats as one project rather than three competing channels, which keeps the editorial voice tight. The trade-off is that if you do not share the underlying sensibility, that sensibility will show up in every format — there is no "neutral wing" of First Things to retreat to.

Pricing

Where First Things falls behind

No real progressive or theologically liberal counterweight in the editorial line. First Things does not pretend to be politically neutral, and on most contested cultural questions — sexuality, gender, abortion, religious liberty, the shape of liberal democracy — it lands on the conservative side. Progressive religious readers will recognize this immediately and either accept it as the frame or find a publication that matches their priors. Sojourners is the obvious counterpart on the other side; Christianity Today sits closer to the center.

Limited devotional and pastoral content. The magazine is a journal of ideas, not a tool for daily formation. There are no reading plans, no devotionals, no prayer guides, no sermon helps. A pastor will find essays that inform preaching but no preaching aids. A layperson will find arguments worth thinking about but no liturgy for Tuesday morning. That is by design, not a gap to fix, but it is a real limit if formation is what you came for.

A house style that assumes the canon. The default First Things essay assumes you know who Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, Maritain, and MacIntyre are, can follow a paragraph on natural law without a glossary, and will recognize an allusion to Dante in passing. The prose is not jargon-heavy and the editing keeps it readable, but new readers without a humanities background sometimes feel that they have walked into a graduate seminar three weeks late.

A bench broad within a band, not unlimited. The contributor list crosses Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, Jewish, and evangelical lines, which is more than almost any other publication manages. It does not meaningfully include Latter-day Saint, Pentecostal, or Majority-World Christian voices, and rarely platforms Anabaptist or progressive-mainline perspectives. Readers from those traditions will find First Things interesting but should know it is not their publication in the way it is, say, a serious Catholic's publication.

A web experience that is functional, not designed. The site does its job — the type is readable, the archive search works, the podcast plays — but it has none of the discovery polish of a modern publication. Browsing back issues is a click-heavy process; finding the right essay on a topic usually means leaving the site and using a general search engine.

First Things vs. Christianity Today vs. Sojourners

Three different magazines, three different rooms in the same building. First Things is the ecumenical-conservative intellectual journal — long essays, multi-tradition contributors, conservative editorial sensibility, very little devotional content. Christianity Today is the legacy evangelical magazine of record — broader in audience, lighter in academic register, more pastoral, more news-driven, and editorially centrist within evangelicalism. Sojourners is the progressive Christian magazine on the social-justice side of the spectrum — activist in tone, focused on poverty, race, peace, and climate, theologically rooted in the Anabaptist and mainline Protestant traditions.

Different strengths. First Things is better at sustained intellectual argument across traditions and at the bioethics-and-religious-liberty beat. Christianity Today is broader — news, profiles, pastoral writing, global Christianity reporting, the Russell Moore and Bonnie Kristian columns — and reaches a much larger evangelical readership. Sojourners is the natural home for progressive Christian writing on systemic justice and the only one of the three with that political center of gravity.

Practical recommendation. If you want a quarterly stack of essays you will actually argue with, subscribe to First Things. If you want the mainstream evangelical-news read with broader cultural coverage, Christianity Today is the better fit. If your theological and political instincts lean progressive, Sojourners will feel like home in a way the other two will not. For readers building a serious religion-and-public-life reading habit, the honest answer is that you might want to read all three — they cover different stretches of the conversation, and the disagreements between them are part of what is interesting.

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