First Things, Part the Second

Joseph Bottum, the new Editor of First Things, writes, as the first essay of what was once Richard John Neuhaus’s The Public Square, a fine and subtle introduction to the magazine under its new headship. Mentioning Connecticut’s brief attempt to undress the public square by restructuring the leadership of the Catholic Church in that state, as well as the resurgence of 70’s style economic theory, he writes, “A great deal of the seriousness in American public discourse has fled.” This is his transition to a discussion of the path the magazine he now heads is going to take as it regroups after the death of its founder and guiding light of almost twenty years. Of that seriousness, he writes, “The task of First Things is to call it back.”

The paragraph that follows is a listing of things that Christians hold, and that, ultimately, all humans hold, in common because these common things are the first things of concern: the respect for life, the defense of responsible liberty, the brotherhood of those who seek God, the care of the weak, and the defense of the whole truth. That paragraph reads:

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.

This is a fine brief for a magazine to cover, a truly conservative and Christian one, I believe (note that the passage on feeding the hungry and caring for the poor is not paired with a dogmatic assertion that government action is the most, or the only, efficacious means to that end). It is consistent with the mission as Neuhaus shaped it, and it seems that Joseph Bottum will do a fine job of carrying on in Neuhaus’s footsteps.