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** Daily Newsletter: November 7, 2025
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** In today’s newsletter:
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JEREMY M. CHRISTIANSEN: On Converting Your Spouse ([link removed])
BETHEL MCGREW: Wistful Agnostics and True Believers ([link removed])
PETER J. LEITHART: The Classroom Heals the Wounds of Generations ([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 the prudence of publicly calling a spouse to conversion, the two modes of intellectual Christian converts, and the right relationship between teacher and student.
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** On Converting Your Spouse ([link removed])
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** Jeremy M. Christiansen
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Vice President JD Vance was recently subject to intense backlash for stating that he desires his Hindu wife Usha to convert to Catholicism. Jeremy Christiansen, who converted to Catholicism from Mormonism, intimately knows the struggle of a mixed-faith marriage—it took years for his wife, a devout Mormon as he had been, to join him in Catholicism. He writes, “Prudently and publicly expressing the heartfelt hope that one’s spouse convert may just be the means by which God gives that ever important ‘twitch upon the thread.’”
For further reading: Josh Turner wrote in “What Mormons Can Teach Us About Interfaith Marriage ([link removed]) ” (2013) that while members of the Mormons have low rates of marrying outside their communities, “[W]hen a member marries outside the faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does a remarkably good job of both welcoming and witnessing to those non-member spouses.” Perhaps this also works in the opposite direction, when one swims the Tiber.
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** Wistful Agnostics and True Believers ([link removed])
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** Bethel McGrew
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Gone are the days when atheism was the default state of intellectual life. Now, a cautious probing of Christianity is growing among thinkers who originally dismissed it. Bethel McGrew categorizes these intellectuals into two groups: First, the agnostics who think Christianity is the “code source” for Western civilization, such as Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland; and second, those who seem to have had a genuine conversion of faith such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger.
For further reading: Many of these intellectuals today are reaching the same conclusion against the New Atheists as First Things founder Fr. Richard John Neuhaus did in “Can Atheists Be Good Citizens? ([link removed]) ” (1991): “The newer atheism is the atheism of unreason. It is much the more dangerous because the more insidious.”
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** The Classroom Heals the Wounds of Generations ([link removed])
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** Peter J. Leithart
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Good education operates on the chronological difference between teacher and student. Peter Leithart writes, “Students must trust and entrust themselves to the wisdom of the teacher, yielding their shapeless souls to his sculpting. The ‘aged’ teacher must die to possibilities and plasticities that are still open options to his students. In self-sacrificial love, he hardens himself, foreswears youthful play, and gives his students a taste of his life-and-death struggle for truth.”
For further reading: The hierarchy of education is, counterintuitively, freeing. Freedom is the goal of the liberal arts rightly taught. For more on “What a Liberal Education Means ([link removed]) ” (2024), read John Londregan’s induction speech for Princeton’s 2023 Phi Beta Kappa members.
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
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Newsletter Editor
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