The State of First Things, February 2011

Before getting to the review of this issue, a note about the Editorial changes.  There is still no mention in the magazine about any change in the editor--which is really quite surprising.  The web page did announce that R.R. Reno is taking over as the new editor.  Earlier, the web page also had a very brief note from the editors announcing that Joseph Bottum had left--it was the nice pro forma announcement that should have been issued months ago.  But, here is the odd part.  Joseph Bottum also sent out an e-mail, apparently to everyone in his e-mail folder (which is the only reason I would have received the letter), announcing that he had left First Things.  Both Bottum's e-mail and the editors said he left to pursue other projects--which is the normal thing to say.  But, the two statements had different dates on which Bottum left--the editors marked his departure a month earlier that Bottum said he left in his e-mail.  Why?  I have no idea.  And, honestly, I wouldn't even care if this whole thing hadn't been handled in such an utterly bizarre, secretive fashion.  How secretive has it been?  Well, here is an odd indicator.  I have a statcounter running on this blog, which keeps track of, among other things, what google searches people used to find this blog.  Since my post about the January issue in which I noted that Bottum had left, I have been getting  steady stream of visits to the site from people searching for such things as "Joseph Bottum fired" or "Joseph Bottum leaving First Things" and so on.  Now, this blog had absolutely no information about the matter, but if one was curious about the editorial change and googled anything looking for information about it, my blog post on it was one of the few things you would find.   That is really not a great state of affairs--this should have been handled better.  Someone with absolutely no inside information should not be the primary place people end up looking for information.  Piecing it all together, it looks like it was a really acrimonious split, and there was probably some sort of strange dual separation date--he might have been removed as editor but they kept paying him for another month--and I suspect that everyone agreed to not talk in public about it.  At some point in the not-too-distant future, I suspect some enterprising journalist will piece together the story--I hope the details aren't as embarrassing for First Things as all this secrecy makes them seem.

But, the editor change presents me with a serious problem.  My subscription has one more issue left.  Will Reno make the magazine better or worse?  Is it worth $40 to find out?

[Note added much later: my concluding comments on the Joseph Bottum/First Things split, can be found in the review of the June/July issue.]


And now for the review of the February 2011 issue:
A. Must Read Articles
1. Meilaender, "The Catholic I Am"
This is an essay nominally about why Meilaender has remained a Lutheran, but really about the ecumenical idea.  There are quite a few Protestants who feel a real tension in the unhealed break with Rome.  The church is universal, so why have all the denominations?  And, as Neuhaus once noted, if the church is going to become whole again, it will do so in the Roman Catholic church.  Yet, formal reconciliation doesn't seem possible.  It's hard enough to imagine reconciliation between the Lutheran Church and the Roman Catholic church, but imagining it between small nondenominational evangelical churches and Rome is really hard.  Meilaender makes a really interesting point in the midst of his discussion--Lutherans spend too much time trying to figure out what it means to be distinctively Lutheran.  Lots of protestant churches do that.  A small, non-denominational evangelical church constantly feels the need to explain its existence by explaining how it is unique.  But, why?  Why try to make oneself distinctive?  Why not simply say that the church is simply a part of the holy, catholic and apostolic church, that there is nothing distinctive about it at all, but that it is simply a faithful part of God's kingdom.  Such an answer is remarkable for its simplicity.  It approaches the ecumenical impulse from the other way around--instead of asking how the small church can be reconciled with Rome, it asserts that we already are united in the only way that really matters through Faith.

2. Wilken, "Culture and the Light of Faith"
Much of the essay is a restatement of how Athens and Jerusalem came together to create Western Civilization.  I know a fair amount about htis topic.  Yet, I still learned quite a few things in this article.  The details on Isidore were particularly fascinating.  In the 7th century, Isidore put together an encyclopedia--this is over a thousand years before the Enlightenment thinkers decided to do the same thing.  Isidore also put together a dictionary--again a thousand years before the Enlightenment.  The whole article is well done.

3. Hart, "A Philosopher in the Twilight"
Hart is rapidly becoming one of those authors who is always worth reading.  This article is about Heidegger.  It is popular philosophy of the best sort--in a few pages, Hart not only provides an excellent survey of Heidegger's thought, but he evaluates it as well.  Hart always strikes me as a fair critic--giving credit where credit is due, but never pulling his punches.  The central question in Heidegger is whether our very attempt to understand the world has destroyed our abilty to acutally see the world as it is.  By trying to make everything comprehensible we may be syetmatically destroying our ability to see things that are outside of our abilty to comprehend.  And, when you think about it, there is no reason to assume that the world is comprehensible.  Heidegger, in other words, ends up being another means by which Christian thoelogy is given philosphical standing--knowing the Truth may require fauth.  The "twilight" in Hart's title is Heidgger's ultimate conclusion--Western philosophy has led inevitably toward nihilism, the coming night is going to block out our ability to understand the world.

4. Robert Miller, Waiting for St. Vladimir"
I was torn about whether to put this article here or int the next section.  The problem: the article is really quite good, but I didn't learn all that much.  It does an excellent job systematically taking apart the silly economic arguments of Alasdair MacIntyre, whose economic views are like those of many other vulgar Marxists.  As such, it is the sort of thing that someone who wanted to know why vulgar Marxism lacks anything like intellectual rigor should read.  And it ends with a really nice observation that the vulgar Marxist argument that workers are exploited because they aren't given the value of what they produce implicitly assumes that people are entitled to own what they produce, which is, of course, the whole point of a capitalist economic system.

B. Flawed, but worth Reading
1. Weigel, "The End of the Bernadin Era"
An overview of the American Catholic Church in recent decades--I found it mildly interesting.  It reminded me, though, of one of the reasons I am a Protestant (which was useful coming right before Meilaender's article)--I have absolutely no problem saying that sometimes church leaders are horribly wrong (they are flawed, sinful human beings after all).  And I have absolutely no internal tension in believing that if the Roman Catholic Hierarchy wanders from the Truth, that faithful Christians need not follow them.


After last month's issue I had just about given up hope for the magazine.  Now, this issue comes along, and reminds me why I liked First Things.  This was an issue well worth reading.  ( A few inane articles (How I became a Catholic through Yoga?  Please.), but not too many. And, I really want to like Armond White's movie reviews, but so far they aim to be so pretentious they end up a vague mush.)  Of course, this issue was put together by the interim editor, so who knows how it relates to the future.