I’m pleased to announce that associate editor Germán S. Díaz del Castillo and I have started a new podcast: Secret Third Thing. Our first episode, “The Fanfiction Reckoning,” is about how fanfiction has subtly infiltrated the publishing industry, and what this online phenomenon says about how men and women relate to media. Deputy editor Veronica Clarke joined us to discuss her essay “The Fanfic Temptation” (2024).

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

From the February issue: Spencer Klavan makes his First Things debut with an ode to the epic that formed both him and Western civilization: Virgil’s Aeneid.

“The poem has often been dismissed as a pale knock-off of Homer, a way station between the Iliad and Dante’s Divine Comedy. . . . But Virgil thoroughly anticipated this accusation and understood his place in history far better than his critics do. Precisely by seeing and acknowledging that the Homeric world of legend is dying away, he creates a gritty new kind of realist epic and a vividly human kind of hero. Surely that’s why Dante chose Virgil to lead him right up to the gates of paradise, and why T. S. Eliot saw him as the bridge between the fading pagan era and the dawning age of Christendom. To the greatest authors of the Christian West, the Aeneid has always represented the fullest literary consummation of what the pre-Christian world had to offer.”

For further reading: Spencer relates how C.S. Lewis said that the effect of the Aeneid is “the immense costliness of a vocation combined with a complete conviction that it is worth it.” Wilfred McClay, writing in 2006 about the “Founding of Nations,” adds this: “The myths of Rome . . . collectively serve to illustrate what has been called ‘the cost of Rome,’ the enormous price to be paid, in countless lives lost and maimed, in the disruption of settled ways, and in the immense sacrifice of personal desires and aspirations, for the sake of the public enterprise of founding and securing this city of destiny.”

Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C, highlights the latest way the University of Notre Dame has failed to live up to its self-proclaimed “Catholic character,” this time by appointing a rabidly pro-abortion professor to lead the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian studies. Prof. Susan Ostermann has “placed much energy in recent years to promoting abortion and to denigrating those who oppose it,” reserving special rancor for crisis pregnancy centers. Miscamble writes, “This scandalous appointment should never have been made, but it will be truly damaging to the Holy Cross Order if it is allowed to stand.”

For further reading: The failures of the nation’s preeminent Catholic university are a frequent theme of these pages. David Lutz kicked off the trend with 1992’s “Can Notre Dame Be Saved?” We are still asking the same question three decades later.

Also, Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., reviewed Miscamble’s biography of long-time Notre Dame president Fr. Ted Hesburgh for the April 2019 issue: “His Excellency.” Hesburgh was probably the most influential college president of the last century—his legacy is worth understanding.

Fertility rates are in freefall across the developed world, and in Rome this manifests as a “pet lifestyle” store where childless people can purchase “pricey sweaters and parkas for . . . chihuahuas and other micro-dogs,” George Weigel writes. The future will resemble the dystopian future envisioned by P. D. James in her novel Children of Men if something doesn’t change. 

For further reading: Darel Paul’s “Feminism Against Fertility” (May 2025) takes a look at the correlation between women’s liberation and declining birth rates.

Upcoming Events

• February 1, 2026: Second Annual Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida: “Recovering the University’s Soul” ft. Bishop Robert Barron | Sarasota, FL. Register here

• February 3, 2026: Second Annual Angelicum Aquinas Lecture: “A Conversation with the Theologian of the Papal Household” ft. Fr. Wojciech Giertych, O.P. | New York, NY. Register here.

• February 10, 2026: The Protestant Mind Launch by Dale Coulter | Subscribe here.

• March 5, 2026: Annual D.C. Lecture: “Our Crisis is Metaphysical” ft. Mary Harrington | Washington, D.C. Register here.

Until next time,

VIRGINIA AABRAM

Newsletter Editor