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** Daily Newsletter: October 15, 2025
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** In today’s newsletter:
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MICHAEL HANBY: Sage Against the Machine ([link removed])
ANDREAS LOMBARD: Germany's Escalating Kulturkampf ([link removed])
GEORGE WEIGEL: Russian Reset Required in Rome ([link removed])
Welcome to the First Things daily newsletter, your guide to the ideas and events shaping our shared moral, cultural, and religious life. Each article we publish continues the conversations First Things has led for thirty-five years.
Stay with us as we explore Paul Kingsnorth’s new book
Against the Machine, Germany’s culture wars, and the Vatican’s overtures to Russian Orthodoxy.
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** Sage Against the Machine ([link removed])
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** Michael Hanby
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From the November issue: Paul Kingsnorth's new book Against the Machine is an “electric” defence of nature “from ravagement by a totalitarian regime of artificiality” Michael Hanby writes in his review. In the book, Kingsnorth pulls the curtain back on the “machine”—the technological and revolutionary forces that have unsettled human connection—and calls for a rebuilding of communion with people, the past, prayer, and place. If there’s a critique to be had, it’s that Kingsnorth conflates rationality with reason in his effort to reintegrate mysticism to the human experience, a retreat Hanby cautions against. “Mythos and logos need each other,” he writes.
For further reading: Last year, Kingsnorth delivered the 37th Annual Erasmus Lecture titled “Against Christian Civilization ([link removed]) ” (2024). In this provocative and convicting lecture, Kingsnorth counseled Christians to cling to their faith for its own sake, rather than as a tool to preserve “the West.” And in his essay “The Cross and the Machine ([link removed]) ” (2021), Kingsnorth recounts his journey to Christianity through years as a radical environmentalist, Zen practitioner, and a Wiccan priest. This wildly popular piece has been republished annually by the Free Press.
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** Germany’s Escalating Kulturkampf ([link removed])
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** Andreas Lombard
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Earlier this month in Germany, a hunting lodge belonging to Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis—an outspoken Catholic and conservative—was destroyed in an arson attack. Andreas Lombard writes that the attack, which Antifa has claimed responsibility for, signals an escalation in the ongoing German culture struggles, where the establishment has been colluding “with extremism in order to exclude and damage the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is now the strongest party in the polls.”
For further reading: For more Germany analysis, read Lombard’s “A Turning Point in Germany’s Abortion Debate ([link removed]) ” or “Anti-Semitic Atonement for the Holocaust ([link removed]) .”
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** Russian Reset Required in Rome ([link removed])
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** George Weigel
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In his Wednesday column, George Weigel calls for the Vatican to reconsider its reunification strategy with the Eastern Orthodox Churches in light of the Moscow patriarch’s role in the Russia-Ukraine war. “Whatever pragmatic sense that might once have made, ‘The road from Rome to Constantinople runs through Moscow’ is now theologically absurd, because the leadership of the Russian Church has abandoned Christian orthodoxy,” he writes today.
For further reading: In February, John P. Burgess wrote about the ecclesial ramifications of the conflict in “Orthodoxy at War ([link removed]) .” The piece delves into the history of Christianity in both Russia and Ukraine, which stems from the same source
Upcoming Events
* November 2, 2025: A Night of Poetry with Ben Myers | New York, NY. Register here ([link removed]) . ([link removed])
* November 3, 2025: The 38th Annual Erasmus Lecture: In Praise of Translation with Bishop Erik Varden | New York, NY. Register here. ([link removed])
* November 11, 2025: The Future of Higher Education, a discussion with Mark Bauerlein and Mark Regnerus | Irving, TX. Register here. ([link removed])
* January 9, 2026: Second Annual Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida | Sarasota, FL. Details coming soon.
Until next time.
Virginia Aabram's signature
** VIRGINIA AABRAM
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Newsletter Editor
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