** Daily Newsletter: October 2, 2025
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** In today’s newsletter:
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CARL R. TRUEMAN: Toward a New Humanism ([link removed])

JONATHON VAN MAREN: As Long as You're Living ([link removed])

DENNIS J. WIEBOLDT III: The Red Mass and the Vestiges of Catholic Lawyering ([link removed])

Welcome to the new and improved Daily Newsletter from FIRST THINGS. Our content isn’t going to change drastically—we’ll still bring you the new articles each day, straight to your inbox.

This newsletter will now also situate each new article within the larger conversations FIRST THINGS has been leading for thirty-five years. While concern for public life and currents shaping it is the daily focus of our publication, we must not lose focus on the religious and spiritual center of society and the soul. Even as we delve into the particulars, we contemplate the whole.

And if you don’t want to read all that, the new articles are listed at the top.
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Toward a New Humanism ([link removed])
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** Carl R. Trueman
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From the October issue: “Human nature has been dismantled, disenchanted, disembodied, and desecrated,” Carl Trueman diagnoses in the October issue’s lead essay. To fix this, honest thinkers of all backgrounds need to expose the faulty logic of anti-human ideas like transgenderism, pornography, and surrogacy. This essay was originally presented as the 2025 FIRST THINGS lecture in Washington, D.C.

For further reading: Matthew Crawford traces the origins of the anti-human priors that undergird the tech industry in this wide-ranging essay titled “The Rise of Antihumanism ([link removed]) ” from the September 2023 magazine.
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As Long as You're Living ([link removed])
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** Jonathon Van Maren
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Many people know the feeling of reading the book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch to a child and struggling to get through it without crying. In it, a mother tells her child “As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” At the end, the son tells his frail old mother, “As long as you’re living, my mommy you’ll be.”

“That last phrase—‘as long as you’re living’—took on a heartbreaking significance with the news that Munsch, who lives in Canada, has been approved for euthanasia,” Jonathon Van Maren writes today. Munsch said in a recent interview that his memory and creativity are in decline, and he’d rather die when he’s lucid enough to consent rather than be a “lump” with dementia. It’s one of the most sickening examples of the fruits of Canada’s “medical aid in dying” program, which has killed 60,000 Canadians.

For further reading: Jeremy Bannon, a Canadian physician, wrote in May about working in a profession where his colleagues are complicit in death. In “I’m Sorry My Colleague Killed Your Sister ([link removed]) ,” Bannon describes an encounter with the brother of a woman he treated who eventually opted for assisted suicide: “He thanked me, almost as if my view of care was a unique approach to ‘the healing art.’ In Canada, it increasingly is.”
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** The Red Mass and the Vestiges of Catholic Lawyering ([link removed])
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** Dennis J. Wieboldt iii
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As the judicial year begins, Catholic lawyers will be flocking to the Red Mass. Its name is derived from the red vestments worn to represent the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, which fell upon the apostles like “tongues as of fire.” Dennis J. Wieboldt III, a JD/PhD student at Notre Dame, recounts the history of this legal tradition from its origins in England in the High Middle Ages through the Catholic law school boom in the U.S. in the early twentieth century.

For further reading: When the FIRST THINGS website was more like a blog, we noted ([link removed]) in 2009 that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was no longer attending the Red Mass. Why? Because the homily was “outrageously anti-abortion.”

Until next time.
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** VIRGINIA AABRAM
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Newsletter Editor
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