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** Daily Newsletter: October 24, 2025
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** In today’s newsletter:
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EPHRAIM RADNER: Anglican Imaginary ([link removed])

THOMAS G. GUARINO: Vatican II at Sixty ([link removed])

PETER J. LEITHART: Beauty Rhymes with Death ([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 the thinning of Anglicanism, the legacy of Vatican II, and the interconnection of all things.

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** Anglican Imaginary ([link removed])
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** Ephraim Radner
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From the November issue: Twenty-first century Anglicanism no longer has “a ‘thick ecclesial imaginary,’ a shared and complex way of making sense of the world within the Church,” Ephraim Radner writes in this month’s column. Western Anglicanism’s practice has been “diluted by the spread of commercial evangelicalism,” straying from its foundational vision of communal integration of Christianity with all facets of life.

For further reading: The “thinning” of Anglicanism is what allowed for the current scandals and schisms over same-sex marriage and the female archbishop of Canterbury. Mouneer Anis, the Anglican archbishop emeritus of Alexandria, Egypt, wrote about the controversial appointment to the See of Canterbury earlier this month in “Sarah Mullally and Reforming the Anglican Communion ([link removed]) .”
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** Vatican II at Sixty ([link removed])
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** Thomas G. Guarino
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As one who is intimately familiar with the documents and personalities of the Second Vatican Council, Rev. Msgr. Thomas Guarino says he is “bewildered when I run across articles that call the council into question, insisting it had been the work of theological revolutionaries hell-bent on remaking the Church in the image of the modern world.” In understanding the Council’s output, especially when considering the historical context, one can conclude that “the achievements of Vatican II are legion.”

For further reading: Reflecting on the council’s fiftieth anniversary, Fr. Thomas Joseph White weighed warring interpretations of the council through the lenses of Friedrich Nietzsche and John Henry Newman in “The Tridentine Genus of Vatican II ([link removed]) ” (November 2012).
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** Beauty Rhymes with Death ([link removed])
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** Peter J. Leithart
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Drawing on the thought and poetry of Jan Zwicky, Peter Leithart examines the interconnectedness of all things in his column today. Zwicky, a philosopher, poet, and violinist, writes about the concept of resonance—a metaphor for uniting universality and particularity. In listening for resonance, one can hear how seemingly disparate things like death and beauty contain one another: “If the world resonates, its harmony must encompass death.”

For further reading: Back in January, Leithart wrote on musical metaphysics in “The Theology of Music ([link removed]) ”—“Music harmonizes what is logically contradictory, as an aesthetic ‘coincidence of opposites.’”

Until next time.
Virginia Aabram's signature


** VIRGINIA AABRAM
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Newsletter Editor


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