The May Issue Has Arrived

The new issue¯ First Things ’ contribution to the Spring¯has arrived at last: the first hints of new growth since the cold winter came upon us. More than hints, perhaps, for it is, in its way, as strong an issue as the magazine has ever published.

There’s a new poem, for instance, from Richard Wilbur , by every estimation the nation’s greatest living poet: the last heir of the magisterial tradition of American poetry. And there’s Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith’s gentle but unyielding declaration that the sloppy Catholic liturgy as it developed since Vatican II has seriously betrayed the goals of Vatican II¯a major announcement, given that Ranjith is secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments in Rome.

What’s more, you’ll find in the May issue another edition of The Public Square¯ First Things ’ most popular feature, begun and carried on brilliantly for almost twenty years by the magazine’s founder, Richard John Neuhaus, who was lost to us in January. Written now by First Things ’ editor, Joseph Bottum, The Public Square this month includes “Of Second Things¯and First Things,” an essay about our goals, our interests, and our concerns:

Certain matters remain at the heart of what the magazine exists to do. The struggle to halt the slaughter of the unborn and the ill, for instance¯the need to defend the weakest among us, constantly threatened by a culture that accepts abortion and euthanasia as easy devices with which to solve personal and social difficulties. We believe the United States to be a grand historical experiment, worth defending in its own right and inherently interesting to study. We work for the advancement of Jewish“Christian relations. We feel the divisions of Christianity¯Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic¯as a scandal that shames all believers, even while we know that true ecumenism must begin with each tradition’s theological integrity. We demand a society that feeds the hungry and cares for the poor. We know that the political effort to strip religion from the public square is an attempt to undermine the American experiment, and it will bring only disaster in its wake. On all this, we will not be silent, and we will be heard.

First Things is not a political magazine. It deals with religion, culture, and the moral structures of public life, and it does so in the politically indifferent light of philosophy, theology, literary theory, and historical study. We live, however, in strange days: a time in which the doing of such things¯the very attempt to be serious¯is itself a political act, with political consequences and political costs.

Politics is a secondary activity, of course. Even theology, philosophy, and poetry are secondary, in a sense: They may be first in the order of language¯and thus first in the range of what a magazine can actually publish¯but they come second to faith and prayer in the order of existential truth. Still, both politics and intellectual pursuits have a genuine importance and dignity precisely because, in their proper secondary places, they require neither false inflation to the all-encompassing nor false deflation to the insignificant.

“The first thing to be said about public life is that public life is not the first thing,” Richard John Neuhaus declared when he launched First Things in 1990, and he added:

“By religion and public life we mean something like what Saint Augustine meant by the City of God and the City of Man. The twain inevitably do meet, but they must never be confused or conflated. Whether at the beginning of the fifth century or at the end of the twentieth, the particulars of their meeting are always ambiguous. At the deepest level the two cities are in conflict but, along the way toward history’s end, they can be mutually helpful. The polis constituted by faith delineates the horizon, the possibilities and the limits, of the temporal polis. The first city keeps the second in its place, warning it against reaching for the possi-bilities that do not belong to it. At the same time, it elevates the second city, calling it to the virtue and justice that it is prone to neglect. Thus awareness of the ultimate sustains the modest dignity of the penultimate.”

As the dead ideas of previous decades rear again their angry heads, we seem in many ways thrust back to where we were when the magazine began. This is a moment when the modest dignity of the penultimate must be reasserted. This is a day, again, for seriousness. This is a time, once more, for First Things .

The Public Square contains, as well, an essay titled “The Cast of Characters,” an account of the new masthead for the magazine¯the arrangements we’ve made, so far, for continuing the progress of First Things . It’s there that you’ll find, for example, the announcement of the hiring of David P. Goldman and Russell E. Saltzman as our new associate editors.

By way of celebrating his arrival, Goldman contributes to the issue a stunning essay called “ Demographics & Depression ,” linked on the cover with contributing writer Gary A. Anderson’s “ Faith & Finance ” as the magazine’s investigation of “The Moral Dimension of the Economic Crisis.”

Goldman, after examining all the dismal figures, says economic prosperity comes down to this:

Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it their absence that makes us poor. Not only the absolute count of children, to be sure, but also the shrinking proportion of children raised with the moral material advantages of two-parent families diminishes our prospects . . . . There are ways to ameliorate the financial crisis, but none of them will replace the lives that should have been part of America and now are missed.

And Anderson introduces the sometimes-missing element of trust and faith, relating it to the knowledge theologians have of such things:

It is no accident that the word creditor in English comes from the Latin credere, “to believe.” When creditors make loans, they are acting on a belief in the trustworthiness of a client . . . . All of this might seem more clever than true¯were it not for our current economic crisis. For as commentator after commentator has noted, everything boils down to the need to believe. James Surowiecki, writing in the New Yorker, observes that the crisis arose because a number of players misused our trust and made loans to individuals who were not qualified and then pawned off those loans on other buyers, who mistakenly believed them to be low risk. ‘This culture of credulity,’ Surowiecki writes, ‘did plenty of damage to the economy, but now it has given way to something even more corrosive; namely, endemic mistrust.’

In our feature articles, we offer Alan Jacobs’ wise and witty take on the “Green Bible,” which he likes not. For the record, he doesn’t much like red-letter Bibles, either. Color-coded Bibles suggest there is but one biblical theme and “this one theme is the interpretative key to all of Scripture.” This is “not a sustainable claim.” Save a tree; don’t buy the Green Bible.

If it had not been for the overriding attention we devoted to our sad loss of Richard John Neuhaus, the magazine would have offered much more space to praising the career of our constant contributor, Avery Cardinal Dulles, who died in December. But now Thomas G. Guarino undertakes the work, summarizing and explaining the importance of that great theologian in an essay called “ Why Avery Dulles Matters ”:

One suspects that his enduring theological legacy will always be firmly anchored to the documents of Vatican II¯the texts that defined every aspect of his professional career . . . . And it is true that Dulles leaves behind no impressive theological method or system . . . . Dulles’ attention, rather, was searchingly focused on the texts of Vatican II, reading them within the long tradition of the Church, providing a way for the teachings of the great council to be properly received by the Catholic and Christian people.

Meanwhile, Sally Thomas gives readers “ Shadows in Amsterdam ,” a poignant, evocative, and decidedly melancholy tale of the euthanized death of a friend’s mother in Holland:

I knew that in 2002 the Netherlands had led the way in legalizing euthanasia. I knew that, as early as 1972, the Dutch Reformed Church had affirmed voluntary euthanasia “under certain conditions” as a humane response to suffering. It is one thing to know that such things go on in the world. It is another to be privy to the thoughts of someone as he sits in a café with his journal, writing [of his aged mother], “I feel that the doctors need to give her the helping hand she deserves. Why let her suffer? Really, the fun for her is over.”

Then George Weigel gives us “ Slouching Towards Pelosi ,” a review of Shaun A. Casey’s The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 in which Weigel traces from 1960 to 2009 the decay of Catholic politicians’ seriousness about the relation of church and state: “The election of John F. Kennedy may indeed have put an end to the taboo against a Catholic president, but it did so by bringing to the Oval Office a man who had no serious formation in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and who seemed to think of politics as far more a matter of technocratic competence than of moral judgment.”

Want more? This issue of First Things contains probably the most-distinguished set of poets in the magazine’s history¯and without doubt the most-distinguished set of poets published this month in any American magazine. You’ll find not just work from Richard Wilbur but also from A.M. Juster , Timothy Steele , A.E. Stallings , Dick Davis , and Joseph Awad .

In book reviews, we have Carol Zaleski’s praise of Susan R. Garrett’s No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims about Jesus ¯along with George McKenna’s important analysis of two new biographies of Booker T. Washington: “As early as 1899 Washington predicted that a black man would someday become president, but he must have realized that, whoever that person was, he would be the product of, or at least shaped by, an elite culture. Washington wanted more than that. His dream was that, when full civil rights finally arrived, every African American, not just those of the talented tenth, would have mastered the skill of living in a free country.”

Meanwhile, Jeremy Rabkin takes a hard look at Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Sovereignty: God, State, Self , and Zbigniew Janowski examines Denis Dutton’s attempt to cobble up a Darwinian aesthetics in The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution .

Finally, our editor Joseph Bottum writes “ Words of Nectar and Cyanide ,” an appreciative introduction to the work of the Romanian-born French writer Emil Mihao Cioran, the dark and witty philosopher of aphoristic pessimism: However un-Christian and a-religious Cioran sounds, his sensibility is religious through and through. In The Temptation to Exist he speaks of being ‘emotionally’ attached to Christianity and insists that his history is the history of Christianity. It makes sense, I suppose. Who but believers can discern just how deep the darkness goes? His call to unbelievers is a voice crying in the wilderness.”

Add it all up, and this is as a strong an issue of First Things as we’ve ever published. Sadly, much of it is available only to subscribers. Isn’t it time you subscribed, too?