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** Daily Newsletter: October 27, 2025
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** In today’s newsletter:
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DAMIAN THOMPSON: Canterbury Fails ([link removed])
JACOB PHILLIPS: Newman Against Compromise ([link removed])
MARK BAUERLEIN: Charles Murray Comes to God ([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 chaos in the Church of England, the orthodoxy of St. John Henry Newman, and Charles Murray’s journey to faith.
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** Canterbury Fails ([link removed])
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** Damian Thompson
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Damian Thompson charts the chaotic waters ahead of the Church of England as it navigates its first female archbishop of Canterbury, schisms in the Anglican Communion, same-sex marriage, and overall loss of relevancy. The Church of England is holding its contradictory factions together with little more than duct tape, which Thompson exposes with his usual bite and perception.
For further reading: “The Anglican Communion has been tottering on the brink of implosion for some time now, and recent events have not necessarily been in its favor,” Jordan Hylden wrote in “As Anglicans Meet ([link removed]) ”—in 2006. At the time, the issue was a request for “alternative primatial oversight” from seven Episcopal bishops
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** Newman Against Compromise ([link removed])
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** Jacob Phillips
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In Newman’s early writings, he explained Anglicanism as the “via media between the excesses and errors of the Catholicism of Rome and the Protestantism of Geneva.” But, as Jacob Phillips explains today, Newman left this compromise behind when he swam the Tiber: “He reminds us that compromise in the fundamental truths of religion is just irreligion.”
For further reading: Matthew Schmitz wrote about Newman’s split legacy on the eve of his canonization in “Two False Newmans ([link removed]) ” (October 2019): “One side will be those who venerate Newman as the patron saint of liberal Catholicism . . . on the other side those who imagine he favored the illiberal and ultramontane form of Catholicism that flourished during the nineteenth century. Both are false.”
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** Charles Murray Comes to God (ft. Charles Murray) ([link removed])
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** Mark Bauerlein
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Listen: Political scientist Charles Murray joins Conversations with Mark Bauerlein to discuss his journey toward faith.
For further listening: Murray joined the podcast in 2021 ([link removed]) to discuss his book Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America.
Until next time.
Virginia Aabram's signature
** VIRGINIA AABRAM
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Newsletter Editor
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