Author: Eric Johnson

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.

The following is a letter to New Oxford Review, which used to be one of my favorite magazines. I welcome any comments about the magazine, even if you want to tell me I’m off-base.
To the Editors:
With profound regret, I would like to cancel my subscription to New Oxford Review. I have subscribed for almost a decade, starting a few months after my conversion to Catholicism. At that time, I found NOR to be a boon to my spiritual life, and I looked forward to reading every word of every article. The magazine had a literary flair and a spiritual depth that few other journals possessed; it was a gem, and it fueled my knowledge of, and zeal for, the faith. I reveled in the quirks and intricacies of your eclectic group of writers.
Over the last few years, you have published a few of my writings (one letter and several book reviews.) I enjoyed working with Jim Hanink, who was a good and encouraging editor. However, the change in tone and substance in the last four years has been hard to miss. At first, I was excited to see you directly engage the world, though I had appreciated the meditative tone of many articles. As time passed, though, I realized that NOR’s new doctrine of combative orthodoxy had morphed into intolerance. I don’t mean “intolerance” in the post-modern sense of calling falsehoods false, and rejecting the idea that all value systems are equal. I like that kind of intolerance. What I’m talking about is your willingness – even eagerness – to attack anyone who does not share your exact views on Catholic life and belief, whether in essentials or non-essentials.
Calling the faithful back to essential Catholic truths is a desperately necessary task in these times, and that isn’t what I’m concerned about. It’s that if these truths aren’t implemented in exactly the way you recommend, you want to cast the people you disagree with into the outer darkness. Instead of looking for common ground, you seem intent on finding reasons to bludgeon anyone who disagrees with you in the slightest matter. While we admire St. Athanasius for fighting contra mundum, he was forced into battle, and had the world rejected the Arian heresy he would have been content to teach and feed his flock. You seem to enjoy a fight for its own sake.
Take economics, as one example among many. Reasonable, faithful Catholics can disagree about the role of the state in economic affairs. As the nature of economics changes, the teachings of the popes will naturally evolve, though the principles underlying those teachings remain solid as a rock. To hear NOR talk, you would think that distributivism is the official Catholic economic program, even though the popes (especially the present one) have stressed that many economic models are compatible with the faith.
Other recent targets have included Father Richard John Neuhaus, National Catholic Register, and other orthodox Catholic persons and institutions. You’ve even started referring to them as “moderates.” For me, the final straw was that article attacking the leadership of a Catholic high school. Were there no Catholic nursing homes to beat up on that month? Even if the article was true – and it was sharply questioned in a subsequent issue – was it charitable to use your pages in that way?
Less important but still significant, NOR just isn’t that fun anymore. Reading it has become a chore, and as the magazine has expanded the writing quality has dropped. There are other problems as well – the tone of mockery has crept into far too many house editorials; the attempts at satire are strained and unfunny; and (yes) the ads in other publications have grown strident and tiresome.
I understand that you see your new role as a popularizer of Catholic orthodoxy, a champion of the true understanding of Catholicism. But whereas you used to cajole and convince, now you thunder and denounce. Who do you imagine will be swayed by this approach? Surely not the vast numbers of marginal Catholics, who will never pick up NOR. Our harried priests? The ones who agree with you probably already subscribe, and those who don’t will be put off by your new tone. You are only preaching to the converted, and paradoxically, your influence with English-speaking Catholics will continue to shrink as you attempt to increase it. Better that you should remain a small-circulation magazine doing much good in a quiet way, than a small-circulation magazine doing only a little good, loudly.
Please do not refund the remainder of my subscription; consider it a very small gift for all the years of good reading you have given me. If you recover your earlier voice, I will be quick to revive my subscription. I thank God for what I received from you, and I wish you well.
Regards,
Eric M. Johnson

Here was a scene to haunt the memory for ever – a kind of Dante’s Inferno – but on ice….Outside the white building were stacks of long pieces of ice – each about three metres long – melting away in the noon heat.
Beyond the ice pile was an open pergola, with piles of body parts in plastic bags surrounded by puddles of water from melted ice. Occasionally, soldiers would slide the bars of ice into the white building through open doors over a white tiled floor where you could see stacked rows of whole body bags.

That’s from Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper (full article here). If you’ve been having an enjoyable Columbus Day weekend, not paying attention to the news, you might not have heard about the bombing in Bali, Indonesia, that took dozens of lives, most of them Australians. Their crime was going to a nightclub when a terrorist decided it was a wonderful night for a mass murder, just like the September 11 victims’ crime was going to work that day.
You know, the Australians fought alongside the U.S. in every war we fought in the 20th century. I hope our government is doing everything it can to help Australia in any way they need, though I’m sure it already is. As for our countries’ intelligence services, I hope they patiently assemble the evidence and find out where the murderers are. If they can be apprehended, then arrest and try them. If that would put too many innocent lives at risk, then kill them. If you think that building a coalition is a prerequisite for morally upright warfighting, I’d say that Australia is a definite “yes” when the time comes to invade Iraq.
I used to think that Pax Christi and their sister “peace” organizations were simply misguided. Now I think they’re dangerous. Reflexively opposing any use of force is just as morally obtuse as reflexively approving the use of force. When their “solutions” of prayer and non-violent persuasion have run their course, murderous men will still be able to prey on innocent lives.
Here’s a quotation from their solution to stop international terrorism:
“Since Slobodan Milosovic was brought to trial for crimes against humanity, though he had a whole country for hiding, why can’t others?” Our moral betters at Pax Christi didn’t notice that we bombed the crap out of Serbia for two-and-a-half months, then threatened his regime with a land invasion. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d still be directing his goons from Belgrade. (By all means, read that quotation in context. Read their whole site.)
These people are idiots. I’m sorry I can’t dress that up in more nuanced language, but anyone who thinks terrorists will be deterred by “international law” is willfully ignorant of reality. To clothe such rhetoric in the mantle of the Christian religion, and to use the name of Jesus Christ to promote their fantasies, is repugnant.
Not that I’m minimizing the usefulness of prayer; indeed, I pray in the words of Psalm 58:

The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance;
He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked,
So that men will say,
“Surely there is a reward for the righteous;
Surely He is God who judges in the earth.”

My posts have mostly been about firearms or my kids, so I thought I’d better move on to other subjects, lest someone think that all I do is sit around the house cleaning my guns and making babies. (What a life that would be!)
It struck me why so many people don’t like contemporary art. I used to think it was because “naturalistic” and “representational” are dirty words in the visual arts, which means that art that looks like something in the natural world, or that could possibly exist in the natural world, is frowned on by our cultural “betters.” Given the choice between looking at sailors trying to stop a shark from eating a man, and gazing at a painting of three colored bars, just about everyone is going to pick the shark. We know what sharks are, and we can look at the painting and understand it on some level without knowing who the artist was, what his intention might have been, etc. You can’t say that about most contemporary art — you have to know what was going on in the artist’s fetid mind if you want to know what those three bars are about.
That’s part of it, but even more than that, I believe that people seek an encounter with Beauty when they visit an art museum. The main purpose of contemporary art is to spark an emotional reaction in the observer. The experience is confined to the observer and the art object, with the final end located inside the observer. How different that is from the great masters of the past, who used art to direct the observer’s attention to things outside the observer and the object. Chances are, when you look at Michelangelo’s David, you’re not just thinking about the sculpted marble in front of you. You’re probably thinking of the biblical text that inspired the story, the peculiar proportions of the head and what that might mean, the magnificence of the human body…the focus isn’t just on your personal reaction. Your emotions heighten your intellectual and spiritual reaction, but they are not center stage.
You can’t tell someone that their emotional reaction is right or wrong, any more than you can say that the color red is right or wrong. That’s one key to the appeal of contemporary art (besides the Gnostic pleasures of esoteric knowledge): the value- and fact-free zone it occupies. If you have an opinion on a representational art object, it can be located in the gamut of possible interpretations. If you say that Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel is an expression of his increasingly pessimistic view of man at that point in his life, that’s defensible. If you say that the painting means the artist liked poached eggs, you’re wrong. But if you said the same thing about a Jackson Pollack canvas, who could tell you you’re wrong? Maybe Pollack’s id liked poached eggs that day, who knows?
I don’t think your average person wants to walk out of a museum thinking that he’s had a great encounter with himself. I know who I am — if I want to have an encounter with myself, I can do that anytime without leaving the house. People want to walk out thinking that they’ve become better as human beings, even if it’s just a teeny bit better. Beauty, not private, subjective emotions, is the only thing that can satisfy that need.

This quotation combines two of my pet peeves:

The power of the media has taken center stage in the hunt for the shooter — or shooters — who has used a high-velocity rifle to slam a single bullet into 10 victims since Oct. 2….

(Full story here). Apparently the editors at Reuters don’t work on weekends, because there are three things wrong with this sentence.
1. What’s a “high-velocity rifle”? That means a rifle that travels fast, right? Just like at the beginning of the old “Superman” TV show, “Faster than a speeding rifle…More powerful than a locomotive….”
2. The JFK assasination conspiracy nuts love to talk about the “magic bullet” that tumbled through President Kennedy and Governor Connolly, and how one bullet couldn’t have gone through both. Well, they can be quiet now, because now that “shooter” has “slam[med] a single bullet into 10 victims.” One bullet…10 victims…some of them 50 miles away from each other. This sniper is a much better shot than people are giving him credit for.
3. It ain’t the velocity that gets ya, it’s what it does when it’s inside. Imagine if there were a gun that fired a projectile one atom wide at nearly the speed of light, and someone shot you with it. Maybe it would do a little damage as it passed through, but it wouldn’t kill you. A typical .223 bullet (which might not be what the shooter is using) is designed to tumble once it hits a target, which can cause massive internal injuries. Likewise, a low-velocity weapon can be just as deadly, if not more — the reason most Civil War soldiers had their limbs amputated after being shot wasn’t because of the primitive medicine of that era, but because the slow, heavy rounds would shatter bones when they hit.
Bonus pet peeve: twice I’ve seen references to “police wearing flak jackets” and “gas station attendants donning flak jackets.” There are some new military flak jackets that can stop pistol rounds, but in general, flak jackets are used to stop battlefield shrapnel, and are useless against bullets. What the reporters mean is “body armor” or “bulletproof vests,” unless the policemen and gas guys think the sniper is going to start using mortars or artillery pieces to attack.

</pedantry>
[Ten points if you get the “Simpsons” reference in the headline of this posting.]