One of the more dramatic stories of my childhood concerned a magazine and the bargain my mother struck that made her a lifelong subscriber. Toward the end of the war—World War II, that is—a draft notice arrived for my father. Since he worked in a war-related industry and was the only support of my blind grandmother, his wife, and three daughters, he had long been deferred. Now a notice. While he appealed to the draft board, my mother promised God (or maybe our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility) that if his appeal were upheld, she would give money to the first person who asked her.

My father was deferred. The next person to come to our door was a salesman from Extension, a magazine reporting on Catholic home missions in Dakota, Alaska, maybe Kentucky—out there, far, far from Chicago. When I left home at 22, my parents were still getting Extension, and as far as I know, they still are.

They and so too their children were magazine readers. Magazines were often fodder for the debates my father and I had throughout my high school and college years—race and the civil rights movement was the chief topic then. Some of those magazines were Catholic, some were not. Many of them were a font of information and opinion, which kept my parents alert to shifts in religion, politics, and the union movement. Even better, they gave me a lot to argue about with my father.

When I say, as I often do, that magazines, especially journals of opinion, are a critical and intense form of adult education, it is this childhood experience, then my experience as an adult, my husband's, my children's, the experience of my friends and neighbors, my colleagues, and even strangers on the train that I draw upon. Even my grandson when a year old ate up Commonweal, while he ripped up Information Age.

What do I mean by a critical and intense form of adult education? Information, Formation, Conversation, and Persuasion are what journals of opinion are all about, and inevitably they are directed to adults who are already educated, mature, reflective men and women, adults who already have a worldview. Nonetheless, the outcome of their reading is the shaping and reshaping of their understanding of our world in the context of their deepest beliefs, the pulling apart and reintegration of their worldview. What does the world mean in light of my religious conviction? What do my religious beliefs mean in the world I live in now? Journals of opinion that write from within a religious tradition are few and far between, but they perform a critical function in bringing before their communities a continuing conversation about how to make meaning.

I believe all journals of opinion have had and continue to have an influence on our political, cultural, and religious life far out of proportion to the number of their readers, vastly out of proportion to their resources, and sometimes, though rarely, out of proportion to the worthiness of their opinions.

Of course, we are all opinionated. Journals of opinion, religious or political, exist not only because there are opinionated people who edit them but because there are readers who are also passionate proponents of an outlook—perhaps political, perhaps religious, perhaps literary. And their favorite journal of opinion serves as a compass in giving them their bearings and providing an orientation or reorientation to that outlook.

There is a kind of bargain, a social contract between reader and editor and it is this: a journal of opinion is the preeminent place in our pluralistic society, with its babble of voices and unexamined opinion, where a reader finds his or her deepest religious, political, and cultural understandings stretched, sometimes challenged, sometimes contradicted, sometimes confirmed. A worldview is reiterated and shared in a journal of opinion. It is a place, a community of voices, that over time creates a familiar, known way of seeing and talking about politics, about religious practices and beliefs, about social mores and monstrosities, about novels, movies, plays, indeed about how we live, and how we should live. Journals of opinion point to the links and connections among these cultural, political, and religious sensibilities. Hence the phrase "Commonweal Catholic" to characterize editors, writers, readers who have over almost eight decades gathered around its particular social construction of reality. So too, America, The Christian Century, The New Republic, The Nation, The Tablet (of London), Sojourners, The New York Review of Books, The Progressive, First Things, Crisis, Dissent, and Commentary.

In brief and by way of definition: In journals of opinion a nexus of ideas is attended to in a consistent manner and framed in a characteristic rhetoric that sets a tone and establishes a running narrative issue by issue through which a community of editors, writers, and readers acquires, maintains, and renovates a distinctive voice and outlook. Over time, this conversation creates habits of thinking and a community which is sustained by its distinctive point of view and enlarged by drawing new members, new readers into its conversation. This community of readers can also have an impact within its own tradition. "Tradition," as the sociologist Anthony Giddens writes, "is not wholly static, because it has to be reinvented by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it." That applies to a religious tradition as much as a political one.

Specifically where do journals of opinion with religious interests fit in? Let me make two distinctions here.

First, I am inclined to the view that almost all journals of opinion in the United States have at least subliminal religious belief and often have roots in a religious community or a moral tradition with religious roots.

From its founding, The New Republic had ties to Protestant-based progressivism; today its ties to the Jewish community are more pronounced. The Nation exercises the venerable American religion of Tom Paine—the village atheist, the nation's skeptic. William Buckley's National Review, though not strictly a religious journal, often expresses a conservative Catholic point of view.

Second, those journals that announce an explicit religious attachment express a wide range of religious and/or moral outlooks. Sojourners comments on the world from its left-leaning, pacifist Protestant evangelical point of view, while The Christian Century is the must-read journal of mainline Protestant clergy. America is published by the Jesuits; since Vatican II it has reflected its liberal-leaning editors, indeed liberal-leaning religious community, and mirrors mainstream Catholicism in the United States. (The late Christianity and Crisis, where I once served as executive editor, was more left-leaning, both culturally and politically guided by the theological and ethical realism voiced by Reinhold Niebuhr.) To varying degrees these journals all comment on the great questions of the day, some taking a more pronounced position of advocacy than others, but all serving a distinct community of readers, or serving as long as that community exists.

Reviews of books, movies, music, theater are one of the primary forums where religious journals of opinion regularly work at sustaining, enlarging, and reinventing their traditions. Reflexive condemnations are no longer persuasive; the index of forbidden books does not exist. Critics working from within a religious tradition must be at least as knowledgeable, rhetorically skilled, astutely observant, as the critics in any secular venue. In fact, the moral imagination and analytic skills of a writer in one of our journals must be more finally honed because the cultural and social context in which critics now write is so morally anemic. This is an enormously large task, at which we do not always succeed.

But if religious and moral traditions are to persist into the future, this work must be done—with integrity, confidence, sometimes a great amount of courage, and perhaps a certain degree of belligerence.

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal magazine.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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