MAGAZINES: UNCOVERING THE CHRISTIAN MIND
by Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent
Washington, D.C.

Even Pope John Paul II's visit to the United States this year drove many news commentators to praise the man but discount his mind-set. A panel of commentators participating in a National Public Radio discussion of the Pope's meeting with President Clinton in St. Louis agreed that few Roman Catholics in America uphold all that the Pontiff espouses.

One commentator wondered aloud how many American Catholics could still consider themselves Catholics, disagreeing as they do with papal pronouncements on abortion, the ordination of women, the place of gays in the church and the death penalty. Totally lost in the commentary was any hint of awareness that those committed to the Lordship and resurrection of Jesus Christ and to the working of the Holy Spirit in contemporary life might disagree on social or moral issues.

Such commentary underscores an unwitting disdain for the very notion of thinking Christianly. In much of our modern American media, the Christian mind is relegated to the Age of Augustine and Aquinas; or worse, it is considered to have suffocated in the wake of publications from Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. In short, many moderns consider the Christian mind a rigid, anti-intellectual, biased and unjust dogmatism, or one given uncritically to right-wing political positions.

Three magazines currently published for small but expanding audiences challenge this disdain for and caricature of the Christian mind that appears rampant in our culture.

The three (and there are others beyond review here) represent the Christian mind tempered on the anvil of experience, knowledge, research, love and wisdom. Anyone who thinks a Christian mind masks a blithe or blind surrender to religious dictatorship or political bondage should examine Commonweal magazine [http://www.commonwealmagazine.org], Books and Culture: A Christian Review [http://www1.christianity.net/bc/current/], and Plough magazine [http://www.plough.com] . (The online offerings are meager but represent a place to subscribe or get sample copies. As of December 1998, Plough is being distributed free.)

The most visible of the three, Commonweal, with an estimated 60,000 readership, this year celebrates 75 years of publishing biweekly (except for the weeks around Christmas and New Year and during the months of July and August).

Commonweal boasts among its stable of contributors Washington Post political columnist E. J. Dionne and former New Yorker staff writer William Pfaff. Its editor is writer Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, and one of its contributors is her husband, the magazine's former editor, Peter Steinfels, now a religion writer for the New York Times.

Published by a group of intellectual Roman Catholic lay people and often labeled neoconservative, Commonweal demonstrates an extraordinary ability to critique both the church and the culture while avoiding sophomoric excesses toward parochial education or sectarian upbringing.

The magazine, which labels itself "an independent review of public affairs, religion, literature, and the arts," prints informative reviews, poetry and thoughtful articles by outstanding thinkers regarding how their faith informs their understanding of the modern world.

I recommend the frequent columns of John Garvey, an Orthodox priest who writes with the clear reasoning of an Ellen Goodman or a David Broder but never lets readers forget that Christian faith remains a reality with which to be reckoned. As the magazine boasts, "America has much to learn from Catholicism," and, I might add, from Orthodoxy in all its forms.

Ironically, Commonweal in its January 15 issue, points to another periodical that signals the public reemergence of the Christian mind from constraints imposed by the Religious Right. That journal, Books and Culture: A Christian Review (B&C), showcases the best of fresh evangelical thinking.

As part of the Christianity Today (CT) corporate line-up of periodicals (CT's book review editor is managing editor of B&C), Books and Culture provides a throw-back to the Christianity Today of its earliest editor, theologian Carl F. H. Henry, who steered the magazine into grappling with current theological ideas and sought less to make it the commercial newsmagazine of religion it has become.

Books and Culture, as Commonweal writer James Turner points out ("The Evangelical Mind," January 15, 1999 issue), appears intent on becoming a Christian equivalent of the New York Review of Books or the New York Times' Book Review. It underscores the emerging importance of Christian scholars who have not hidden themselves in sectarian towers but have challenged the academy from some of the most prestigious and important chairs of learning.

Supported largely by advertisements from traditionally Christian publishing houses, the bimonthly Books and Culture is slowly challenging and altering the landscape of American academic and religious culture.

Readers who believe a Christian mind reflects the thinking of the Jerry Falwells, Ralph Reeds and James Dobsons of the world would do well to tackle the writings of Mark Noll, Nick Wolterstorff, Richard Mouw, Alvin Plantinga, Madeleine L'Engle, George Marsden, Nathan Hatch, Frederica Mathewes-Green and Harold Fickett, diverse Christian thinkers who regularly contribute to Books and Culture. These represent a rewriting and reinterpretation of history and culture by reexamining the essentials of the Gospel.

The Christian mind is given its social conscience in the pages of Plough magazine, the quarterly of the Bruderhof, an Anabaptist-influenced, pacifist community founded in Germany by the late Eberhard Arnold, and now settled in seven sharing communities in the UK and the United States. Like Commonweal, the Bruderhof this year celebrates 75 years of existence.

Plough magazine champions what it calls "radical discipleship" to Jesus Christ. The members of the Bruderhof communities attempt to live out Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. For Plough's writers, "What Would Jesus Do?" becomes more than a designer slogan.

Many of the articles published in Plough are excerpts of books marketed through the Bruderhof's Plough Publishing House. A recent example is a powerful collection of interviews with war veterans turned pacifists compiled by Daniel Hallock under the title Hell, Healing, and Resistance.

The magazine outspokenly criticizes U.S. policy in Iraq and has been calling for a halt to bombings and sanctions for several years. All of its positions are carefully articulated from the perspective of radical Christian thinking in well-written and well-edited articles.

One need not agree with all the positions taken in these small but important magazines, but one must acknowledge after perusing them that the Christian mind lives and moves and has its being firmly rooted in faith as a viable option for intelligent citizens of the modern world.

The American Reporter Copyright 1999 Joe Shea. All Rights Reserved.

Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net

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