Trump’s promise to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education may finally be approaching fruition. The USED, which has become a gargantuan bureaucracy even as test scores and the overall quality of American education plummet, is facing a massive reorganization that will hopefully cut out its DEI actors, Mark Bauerlein writes. Though rooting up such an entrenched bureaucracy is a difficult task, the chances have never been better for “a near-total elimination” of the Department. 

For further reading: For an explanation of why gutting the Department of Education will improve education in this country, read Emmett McGroarty’s “Why the Department of Education Has to Go.”

The Vatican recently released a document discouraging the use of the titles “co-redemtrix” and “mediatrix” for the Blessed Virgin. This is not the first time these titles have sparked lively debate,  Rev. Msgr. Thomas Guarino writes. He traces the controversy over “mediatrix,” which, unlike “co-redemtrix,” the Vatican document did not deem “always inappropriate.” During the Second Vatican Council, theologians debated the title vigorously, failing to come to a resolution. 

For further reading: Last week, Fr. Brian Graebe discussed the concerns over these titles in “Hallowed Be Thy Names.”

From the December issue: Walker Percy’s novels display a particularly American vision of grace and existentialism, Algis Valiunas writes. As modernity did away with many of the existential threats to human survival, Percy grappled with life’s “unrelenting, poignant ordinariness. How to make it through ordinary Wednesday afternoons poses a confounding moral and spiritual problem—sometimes building to a crisis—for Percy and his characters. It is the rare man—a hero—who realizes that he is a moral desperado and sees his way up and out to a triumph, however incomplete, over everydayness.”

For further reading: Percy, like Flannery O’Connor, was a product of Southern Catholicism. On the twentieth anniversary of Percy’s death, poetry editor Micah Mattix compared the two writers in “Whither Walker Percy?” (2010).

First Things is launching our first topical newsletter. It’s called The Fourth Watch, and it’s about Catholicism. The questions facing the Catholic Church have-wide reaching implications and spawn no small amount of sensationalism and quick takes. James F. Keating, a theologian at Providence College, will analyze the storms that the Barque of Peter faces and offer, whenever possible, a passage through them.

Sign-ups are open now, the first installment will go out on Monday, December 1st. Subscribe with just one click. 

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• February 1, 2026: Second Annual Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida | Sarasota, FL. Details coming soon.

Until next time,

VIRGINIA AABRAM

Newsletter Editor