The reaction to my cancellation letter to New Oxford Review has been surprising, both in its intensity and the lack of anyone stepping forward to defend the magazine. (Please, as I said, tell me why I’m wrong about the magazine if you disagree.)The oft-visited Mark Shea blog now has a link to the thing, which brought it to the attention of a many.
Here are my follow-up comments. As in many things, the details are often the most convincing, and I’d like to talk about two of them that may be illuminating. Some may think the issues are petty. Maybe they are. You be the judge.
NOR has consistently shown an aversion to technology. Years ago, it published an article by a man who was co-founding a Catholic community modeled on the Amish model — intensely communal and exclusive of any technology not invented in the last hundred years or so. It was one of those pieces that made NOR so great in the old days — it was provocative and thoughtful, and while I didn’t agree with its conclusion that modern technology per se was harmful to human society, it did provide a useful critique of how our culture embraces technologies without considering the unintended effects.
That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I have no problem with techological skepticism, and I count myself a skeptic as well — even though my family’s food, clothing, and shelter depend on my Internet-related job. If you’ve ever sat through dubious sales pitches from computer companies, or bought software that didn’t deliver what it promised, you’re probably a skeptic as well.
To explain what I’m getting at, a personal anecdote: four years ago, I offered to create a Web site for NOR. That’s the kind of thing for which I would charge a business several thousand dollars, but I’d do it for free, and I even said I’d update their site every month with new articles. One editor was enthusiastic about it, but the “reply” was a short essay in the magazine saying that they didn’t have a Web site, that Web sites were a waste of time and money, and that other magazines could pour their time and money down the rathole of the Internet, but they were not. (I don’t think this was just directed at me — they had apparently received many inquiries about starting a Web site.)
“A ha!” you might be thinking. “This guy is just angry because they rejected him!” I don’t think that’s the case. It was a long time ago, and I’ve been rejected by others without any massive damage to my psyche. I bring it up because last year, NOR effectively reversed themselves, announcing that anyone could republish their content on a Web site, subject to certain conditions. They also pointed out one site that was doing precisely what I offered to do — posting the contents of the magazine online after the print edition comes out. That site was (and for all I know, still is) their de facto Web site.
The second little tidbit is NOR‘s typography. “Now that’s really superficial,” you retort. Not really — in the visual world, form and content aren’t separable. (Distinguishable yes, separable no.) I work in the news business, and have experience with newspaper layout, though I’m not an expert in type. It doesn’t take an expert to see that the overall look of NOR is painfully dated, starting with the pseudo-futuristic headline font they use. It looks as if it was set up on a Mac using PageMaker in 1987, with no real updates since then.
Yeah, yeah, who cares? It’s not like we’re talking about Vogue or Tiger Beat (my apologies for not providing links to those august journals. ;) ) The layout could be overlooked if the editors didn’t choose to attack Envoy magazine for using attractive colors and photographs. Seems to me, if you’re criticizing others for their aesthetic choices, your own choices are fair game. Another major problem with NOR is that they often break the page into three columns of text, which is too many for their large, curvy main font (Cheltenham or a similar one, I think). You’re supposed to shoot for 9-16 words on a line, but with three columns they can only get 4-7.
The management think they’ve discovered a superior way, and not because they embrace the Creator and Redeemer of the world, or drink from the grace of the sacraments, or listen to the teachings of the Church. They believe their personal charism of infallibility extends to minor things like the value of Web sites and desktop publishing, and they defend their opinions on relatively unimportant matters with the same tenacity as the really big things. Such an approach doesn’t make the small things more important, it makes the big things seem less important. A well-intentioned non-Catholic would find himself bewildered by the vehemence with which the writers and editors attack communion in the hand, to cite one recent fracas. I agree that receiving in the hand is significantly different than receiving on the tongue; I see no special value in receiving in the hand, and to our individualistic, narcissistic culture, people might be thinking that the Body and Blood of Christ is something they “posess” when it is placed in their hand, when the opposite is true.
Nevertheless, three-quarters of my countrymen do not receive communion at all, as they are outside of the Church. A majority of American Catholics do not go to Mass on a given week, and therefore they deprive themselves of the Eucharist. Why should we confuse the outsider and the marginal Catholic with such internicine disputes? If NOR really wanted to convert people, they’d focus on changing the larger impediments to faith like consumerism or sexual license. If people’s hearts are converted, the smaller things will fall into place by themselves.
When you fight on all fronts, you’re guaranteed to lose most of the time, and eventually you’ll lose the war, too. It is my fervent hope that the editors of the magazine will steer their ship to rejoin the fleet, instead of fighting their own battles somewhere else.