I Say I Say I Say Unto Thee

Almost despite myself, I love First Things—"the Journal of Religion and Public Life," as it bills itself. I started reading it occasionally back when I was working at the College, and, even as I found myself in deep disagreement with its more conservative theological stances, was immediately attracted to its vast erudition, its lucidity, the way it never backed down from a fight and never wriggled when it reached an uncomfortable conclusion.

Along with the late, lamented Lingua Franca, it pointed a way towards a new model of magazine journalism—more engaged (and less precious) than the academic journals that cluttered the faculty lounge, more intellectually curious than even the best "general interest" magazines. You didn't have to be a theologian to follow the arguments, but you felt yourself growing smarter as you read them.

Now, of course, there are a lot of journals covering the same sort of beat as First Things: I've linked to some of them in the "Sacred and Profane" section of my sidebar. First Things is the least sexy of these, and the most traditional in its viewpoints; it makes the least concessions to our Therapeutic Culture, by refusing to be anything but moralistic and judgmental; but it is perhaps the wisest, the most rigorously-thought, and frequently the best-written of the lot. I don't talk it up as much as I should.

But feast your eyes on the best of the many Johnny Cash encomia written last year—even if the writer, who demonstrates a passing familiarity with Nick Cave (enough to compare his version of "The Mercy Seat" to Cash's), nonetheless claims rather bafflingly to have "never heard of" Einsturzende Neubaten.

Then, if you're ready for something a little weightier, an examination of why Holy Scripture, as read in your local church, is so damned uninspiring. King Jimmy wept; today's translators recoil instinctively from metaphor, from figure—from poetry. The ideal they pursue is a Bauhaus Bible, where form follows function, where the Word of God is communicated efficiently, purged of any distracting traces of useless beauty. There's no dumbing-down worse than that perpetrated by clever people. Read and be horrified, even if you're not religious (Mencken wasn't, but he recognized the centrality of beauty-for-its-own-sake in worship, and reserved special praise for the Catholic Church in that regard).

A new contender on the block: a promised quarterly, The New Pantragruel, is in its first issue now. Promising. If it survives to a third issue, I might start linking to it from the sidebar.