[link removed]
** Daily Newsletter: November 3, 2025
------------------------------------------------------------
** In today’s newsletter:
------------------------------------------------------------
EMMA WATERS: The Surrogacy Exploitation Crisis ([link removed])
VICTOR M. SWEENEY: When Death Calls at Night ([link removed])
MARK BAUERLEIN: Western Civilization and Augustine ([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 me as we explore how surrogacy enables human trafficking, a 1 a.m. visit to the crematorium, and how to read Augustine.
[link removed]
** The Surrogacy Exploitation Crisis ([link removed])
------------------------------------------------------------
** Emma Waters
------------------------------------------------------------
Surrogacy is often seen as an altruistic act, enabling a couple who cannot carry a pregnancy to have a child. But Emma Waters reveals how the entire surrogacy industry, of which only 2 percent of contracts are unpaid, exploits women and commodifies children, with almost no regulation or international oversight. This leads to cases like one in California this summer, where authorities uncovered a home with twenty-one surrogate-born children belonging to a Chinese couple with ties to criminal industries and the Chinese Communist Party. The only solution is a complete ban on the practice.
For further reading: New York state legalized commercial surrogacy in 2020. Jennifer Lahl wrote about the legislation in “Babies for Sale ([link removed]) ,” noting that in the 1980s, Gov. Mario Cuomo’s task force on surrogacy concluded that “contractual surrogacy could not be distinguished from the sale of children and that it placed them at significant risk.” What changed? The legalization of gay marriage upped the demand.
[link removed]
** When Death Calls at Night ([link removed])
------------------------------------------------------------
** Victor M. Sweeney
------------------------------------------------------------
The work of preparing the dead is something most people would rather not dwell on. But Victor Sweeney, a mortician and funeral director, writes today about the poignant last moments with a body before it goes to be cremated, a process he has mixed views on: “It is something of a privilege to handle the mortal remains of those I know and love. It is hard, certainly. But recognizing and knowing a face—even in its pallor, mouth agape—that smiled kindly upon me and my family humanizes the deceased at a time when her humanity is harder to see.”
For further reading: First Things posthumously published an essay by Roger Scruton on “The Work of Mourning ([link removed]) ” (October 2022), where he wrote, “The habit of cremating the dead and then scattering their ashes reflects our post-religious conception of what they become by dying, namely nothing. We briefly snatch at their nothingness and then watch them fade from our empty hands. At the back of our minds is the thought that all duty ends with the life to which it was owed.”
[link removed]
** Western Civilization and Augustine (ft. Chad Pecknold) ([link removed])
------------------------------------------------------------
** Mark Bauerlein
------------------------------------------------------------
Listen: Chad Pecknold, theology professor at the Catholic University of America, joined Conversations to discuss his new book Fire on the Altar: Setting Our Souls Ablaze through St. Augustine’s Confessions.
For further reading: St. Augustine came up in former President Joe Biden’s inaugural address in 2021, which Pecknold commented on in “Joe Biden Misreads Augustine ([link removed]) ”: “Biden gives us a very limp Augustine who delivers only vague liberal pieties of ‘peace, peace.’”
Upcoming Events
* 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
------------------------------------------------------------
Newsletter Editor
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
Copyright © 2025 First Things, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you opted in at firstthings.com.
============================================================
Our mailing address is:
First Things
9 East 40th St Fl 10
New York, NY 10016
USA
Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can ** update your preferences ([link removed])
or ** unsubscribe from this list ([link removed])
.
