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** Daily Newsletter: October 23, 2025
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** In today’s newsletter:
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STEPHANOS BIBAS: Good Christians First ([link removed])

JOHN DUGGAN: What Britain’s Cousin Marriage Controversy Tells Us ([link removed])

CARL R. TRUEMAN: Goodbye “Big Eva,” Hello “Gig Eva” ([link removed])

R. R. RENO: Declaration of Dependence (ft. Leah Libresco Sargeant) ([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 an attempt to synthesize Eastern Orthodoxy and a rights-based legal system, cousin marriage in Britain, “Gig Eva,” and why dependence is not a bad thing.

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** Good Christians First ([link removed])
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** Stephanos Bibas
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From the November issue: A new book by A. G. Roeber attempts to synthesize the American view of rights with Eastern Orthodox theology. However, his approach betrays a progressive agenda, Stephanos Bibas argues: “Buying into modern rights vocabulary cedes too much ground to the will, to autonomy as the highest good.”

For further reading: Bibas wrote “Shying Away from Mercy ([link removed]) ” (February 2016) about the misunderstanding of mercy in the West, especially in the context of legal punishment: “By making benevolence bureaucratic and impersonal, we have suppressed human kindness and empathy, the direct personal contact that stirs the heart.”
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** What Britain’s Cousin Marriage Controversy Tells Us ([link removed])
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** John Duggan
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In a since-deleted blog post, Britain’s National Health Service stated that marriage between first cousins can have “various potential benefits,” including strong family support and economic advantages. This flies in the face of the millenia-old European taboo on cousin marriage, and the reason for this change isn’t hard to guess: Fifty-five percent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins. John Duggan argues that the ensuing debate over consanguinity is a result of “more people starting to worry that English society is morphing into something unrecognizable.”

For further reading: Duggan wrote “The Best of Us Is Medieval ([link removed]) ” about how the Church’s ban on cousin marriage completely “rewired the Western mind.” By breaking up clans, people were forced to cooperate with outsiders, enabling them to build high-trust societies.
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** Goodbye “Big Eva,” Hello “Gig Eva” ([link removed])
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** Carl R. Trueman
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In the years since he coined the term “Big Eva” to describe the celebrity pastors and massive conferences that characterized Evangelical culture, Carl Trueman has seen a shift to “Gig Eva”—the attention-grabbing antics of those who position themselves as Christian authorities on social media. While the celebrities of Big Eva usually came up through service to their churches and communities, now “anyone with the time to spend living online can become a celebrity without having proved himself beforehand in any real service to any church.”

For further reading: What can stabilize the shifting ground of “Big Eva” and “Gig Eva?” In “Protestants Need to Go Back to Basics ([link removed]) ” (2023), Trueman wrote that it starts with a recovery of classical theology and re-emaphasis of doctrine over experience: “A time of social upheaval and chaos such as ours is likely to send even the most devout Christians into despair unless they can place the terrifying flux of life in the earthly city against the unchanging reality of the sovereign God himself.” Also, see frequent critic of “Big Eva” Meg Basham’s popular 2024 essay “The Plot to Queer Evangelical Churches ([link removed]) .”
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** Declaration of Dependence (ft. Leah Libresco Sargeant) ([link removed])
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** R. R. Reno
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Listen: In this live episode of The Editor’s Desk, Leah Libresco Sargeant joins Rusty Reno to discuss her new book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto.

For further reading: Mary Harrington reviewed the book in “Metaphysics of Care ([link removed]) ” (November 2025).

Until next time.
Virginia Aabram's signature


** VIRGINIA AABRAM
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Newsletter Editor


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