Category: Wilderness Wanderings

Rush Hour in Kampen

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

Over a decade ago I participated in a conference at Kampen sponsored by the theological institute of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands Liberated. After clearing my head from the cobwebs of jet lag, I looked out my downtown hotel window to observe teams of Dutch cyclists. They were not out for exercise but dressed in business attire on their way to work.

David Danelo finally helps make sense of that arresting sight.

About 230,000 Dutch citizens died during World War II, or 2.5% of the wartime population of nine million, many from disease and famine as much as violence. Before World War II, bicycles had come quickly to Holland, and the flat terrain made cycling the most affordable and functional form of public transport. After Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940, soldiers confiscated bicycles and recycled the metal and rubber for war materiel. Dutch citizens responded by making bicycle possession a protest symbol; as Nazi convoys careened through Amsterdam’s streets, Dutch cyclists would join hands, up to four abreast, and slow their pace to thwart the convoy’s progress. Even today, Dutch football fans are often seen holding bicycle signs during matches against Germany, and Dutch citizens feels no shame in asking new German acquaintances to “give me my bike back.”

Will Heaven Be Boring?

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

Maybe not the most sanctified question but after reading a fascinatingly sobering piece about the “troubles” in Northern Ireland I had to ask.

Sure the idea of no more suffering has appeal:

1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling placea of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people,b and God himself will be with them as their God.c 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21)

But part of what makes a story like this one in the New Yorker about Belfast so riveting is precisely the presence of mourning, crying, pain, loss, injustice, and death. For instance:

The disappearance of Jean McConville was eventually recognized as one of the worst atrocities that occurred during the long conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. But at the time no one, except the McConville children, seemed especially concerned. When Helen returned home, she and Archie went out to look for Jean, but nobody could—or would—tell them anything about where she had been taken or when she might be back. Some weeks later, a social worker visited the apartment and noted, in a report, that the McConville children had been “looking after themselves.” Their neighbors in Divis Flats were aware of the kidnapping, as was a local parish priest, but, according to the report, they were “unsympathetic.”

Rumors circulated that McConville hadn’t been abducted at all—that she had abandoned her children and eloped with a British soldier. In Belfast, this was an incendiary allegation: Catholic women who consorted with the enemy were sometimes punished by being tied to a lamppost after having their heads shaved and their bodies tarred and feathered. The McConvilles were a “mixed” family; Jean was born Protestant and converted to Catholicism only after meeting her husband. The family had lived with Jean’s mother, in a predominantly Protestant neighborhood in East Belfast, until 1969, when they were driven out, as internecine tensions sharpened. They sought refuge in West Belfast, only to discover that they were outsiders there as well. Several weeks after the abduction, on January 17, 1973, a crew from the BBC visited the apartment and taped a segment. As the younger siblings huddled on the sofa—pale children with downcast eyes, looking shy and frightened—the reporters asked Helen if she had any idea why her mother had left. “No,” she said, shaking her head. Agnes McConville, who was thirteen, noted, hopefully, that her mother was wearing red slippers when she was taken away. She added, “We’ll keep our fingers crossed and pray hard for her to come back.”

So the dark and conflicted parts of life that make the Coen Brothers movies sing will no longer be part of the titles in my Netflix queue in the New Jerusalem. Hard to fathom.

Not only that, but the very notion of a narrative and a direction in history — part of what defines dramas, stories, movies, and history, a beginning, middle, and end — will no longer be part of human consciousness. Or what will be is some sort of awareness of living in a constant or on-going end.

Again, hard to imagine. Can anyone help (all about) me?

The Grand Rapids Option

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

It’s been a while but Tommie Kidd wrote a post about whether historians need a literary agent to get published. The short answer is yes, if you want to publish with a New York City house.

It depends on what type of publishing you wish to do. For most academic publishing, you don’t need a literary agent, because academic publishers are not generally engaged in “trade” publishing, meaning the kinds of books that end up on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Strictly academic publishing is largely directed toward an academic audience of other scholars in the field, or perhaps graduate or even undergraduate students. Many academic books are priced in such a way ($50+) that the publisher plans to sell relatively few copies, maybe a couple hundred, to academic libraries and a handful of specialists.

For trade publishing, however, you generally do need a literary agent. The large, New York-based trade publishers prefer not to interact with authors directly about contracts, not even established trade authors. For these publishing houses, literary agents are gatekeepers and filters – they let the agents go find and develop promising projects, and trusted agents can typically secure contracts for most of the projects they propose.

Surprising here is that Kidd, who is one of the younger evangelical historians with an interest in writing for people in the pew, neglected to mention religious publishers as an option for historians. Once upon a time the evangelical historical mafiosa (Noll, Marsden, Stout, Hatch) regularly worked with Grand Rapids publishers such as Eerdmans, Baker, Zondervan and (further away) InterVarsity. In fact, you could argue that the Grand Rapids publishers were partly responsible for the renaissance of writing about the history of evangelicalism from which folks like Kidd and me benefit. And yet, for Kidd (and his generation of evangelical historians) these publishers do not seem to be on the radar.

As I say, this is odd because of Kidd’s admirable interest in reaching a non-academic and believing audience, which was one of the reasons he wrote his biography of Whitefield the way he did:

Fans of Whitefield know that the chasm between the academic and evangelical approaches to Whitefield is best exemplified by the differences between Arnold Dallimore’s 2-volume Whitefield biography, and Harry Stout’s The Divine Dramatist. Dallimore’s is an explicitly Christian biography, and while Dallimore certainly criticized Whitefield at certain points, it was written primarily for a Christian audience and focused on the ways that God used Whitefield in the Great Awakening. Yale historian Stout (who, for full disclosure, is a friend and a mentor to me) placed Whitefield in the context of England’s theater culture, and focused much more on Whitefield’s worldly context and motivations. To many readers, Stout’s approach seemed overly cynical; indeed, John Piper has said that Stout’s biography is “the most sustained piece of historical cynicism I have ever read.”

I find myself in the strange position of being an admirer of both John Piper and Harry Stout, and a fan of Dallimore’s biography, to boot! In fact, I think that Dallimore’s biography has been one of the best choices for general readers who want to know the amazing story of Whitefield’s ministry, and many evangelical readers will understandably find Dallimore more congenial than Stout. But Stout, and other academic writers like Frank Lambert and Jerome Mahaffey, add a dynamic missing in approaches like Dallimore’s: a broader understanding of the culture and economy that formed Whitefield and made his ministry possible, in an earthly sense.

If Kidd wants to reach a middle ground, and I have no doubt that he does, I suggest that Grand Rapids rather than New York City (sorry TKNY) is the place to go to access it.

Your Subtext is Showing

Published on by D. G. Hart114 Comments

Why do so many people on the firm side of the squishy/hard moral divide care about 50 Shades of Gray (I must have read another 10 posts)? It seems to me that tracking the mainstream productions of Hollywood or American popular culture reveals more about those objecting than it does about the degradation of our culture (which seems obvious to most people). If you are in the habit of watching the junk that sells or attracts ratings (like Breaking Bad), then maybe sometimes your conscience jumps up and bites. But what about your aesthetic sense? And if you have lots of friends who talk about this stuff, then how stimulating is your social life? Maybe you should acquire a better set of associates. Or maybe you are really, really concerned about the moral ethos of American society. But why single out an apparently vapid book and movie? Why not Girls?

Then again, if you are like (all about) me, you sit back and marvel at the cornucopia of cultural expressions, find your niche, and hope for friends with similar sensibilities.

Welcome to Our World

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

From the inimitable musings of CWU:

Think what you want to think (and you will) but Old Life is a one of a kind place, with at least one of everything — Presbyterians, Lutherans, anabaptists, flaming Socia-mentalists, the undermedicated, gaybros, atheists, feisty women, armies of one, cranks, theonomists, non-denoms, tattooed Jeremiahs, academics, lawyers, Mark Jones, Iain the Druid, RSC, New Calvinists, and hillbillies. It’s not for the weak of heart, as this thread attests, but comments are open. Light and heat emanate by turns. It’s a dive bar in a seminary basement, a psych ward with a great library, it’s real and many of us could hardly live without it.

That is the quote of the month.

If No Call to Prayer at Duke . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart80 Comments

What’s with the High Mass at Princeton?

After leading an Ignatian retreat in Boston, Father Carlos Hamel FSJC will be coming to Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey and publicly offering a High Mass in the University Chapel at 9 PM on Tuesday February 3 for the Aquinas Institute. There will be a reception afterwards. This will be, to our knowledge, the first, non-Nuptial, Traditional Latin Mass in the University’s Anglo-Catholic inspired chapel and has special significance as Princeton Alumnus Brother Gerhard FSJC will be serving Mass as well.

Why no respect for Princeton’s Presbyterian heritage? Where’s the outrage?

Moderate Methodism, Yes; Moderate Islam, No

Published on by D. G. Hart37 Comments

Lots of chatter about Duke University’s revoking its decision to allow Muslim students to use the University Chapel to call fellow believers to prayer:

Days after announcing that a Muslim call to prayer would echo from its historic chapel tower, Duke University changed course Thursday following a flurry of calls and emails objecting to the plan.

Instead, Muslims will gather for their call to prayer in a grassy area near the 210-foot gothic tower before heading into a room in Duke Chapel for their weekly prayer service. The university had previously said a moderately amplified call to prayer would be read by members of the Muslim Students Association from the tower for about three minutes each Friday.

Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, said it would be up to the students if they want to use some sort of amplification.

The original plan drew the ire of evangelist Franklin Graham, who urged Duke alumni to withhold support because of violence against Christians that he attributed to Muslims. Schoenfeld said emails and calls came from alumni and others in the community.

It used to be that Methodists were some of those “hot” Protestants who met daily in small groups and employed all sorts of methods to cultivate holiness. Now they sponsor universities where Gothic structures occasionally hold religious services of some kind.

After the events in Paris last week, why wouldn’t we want to happen to Muslims what happened to Methodists? After all, the university only approved one call to prayer on one day of the week. Real Islam has five calls to prayer every day, a circumstance that could well disrupt classes and sleep at Duke. But if Muslim students are willing to settle for one call on one day, wouldn’t that make them as compliant and unthreatening as the United Methodist Church?

We missed a real opportunity here, people.

NSA, Homeland, and God

Published on by D. G. Hart54 Comments

Why should I be worried about the government monitoring my emails or how I surf the web? As someone who is a registered Libertarian (and never voted for a Libertarian candidate) I get it partly. The scale of government is mind-numbing and sometimes frightening, especially in its intelligence and military aspects. Can any regular American aspire to the presidency who has no experience with foreign policy and sensitive intelligence operations? Who can stand in that great day, indeed.

But when I read people who think the world is changing — not to mention ideas about human nature — because of the access now available to government officials through computing and phones, I wonder:

Will you really pay higher insurance rates to escape tracking, or will you swallow the pill of microscopic sensors that watch everything you eat and do—and secure your insurance discount?

The point is not that some simple tweak—making data on us available to us, making it easier to opt out (as if our absence would not be noticed)—would solve the matter. Rather, the point is that a certain view of freedom and a certain view of power are creating a world in which human faculties are superfluous because they are limited and inaccurate compared to scientific measurement.

The tracking revolution is the replacement of, not the extension of a human faculty. Because every advance it offers is a marginal improvement, it proceeds in rational steps toward a goal whose reasons are opaque. Like the division of labor which it imitates, the tracking revolution simplifies knowledge of human beings by breaking us down into our component parts.

For instance, one of the delights (all about me) I take from spy movies or television series like Homeland is a sense that someone is out there monitoring all this stuff, keeping the world safe from bad guys. The same goes for crime shows and murder mysteries (having finished Broadchurch‘s first season last night, I yet again marvel at the Brits capacity to entertain through narratives of justice). It is truly marvelous that any agency can possibly monitor all that stuff, intervene when necessary, and keep the world from careening out of control.

The powers of intelligence agencies and police monitors are of course akin to an all seeing God. If some Christians walk around thinking that certain saints are watching them, most Christians likely live with the scary and comforting thought that God is monitoring everything they do. What is the problem with a few more sets of eyes?

Meanwhile, what possibly could the government find out of interest about me? What Muether and I are planning for the next issue of the Nicotine Theological Journal? Granted, if I were doing something costly to me, something that could get me in trouble in those relationships that most matter — wife, session, department chair — I wouldn’t like the idea that some folks out there know the dirt. But it’s not as if staff at NSA or agents in the CIA are going to give a large rodent’s rear end about activities that might compromise my marriage, church membership, or job. In fact, I can’t imagine anyone wading through all the cookies I use in a day or phone calls I make or email messages I write — along with the rest of America — and finding anything of interest. Average life is so ordinary.

It also helps knowing that my favorite libertarian, J. Gresham Machen, is not looking down reading this.

What Did Charlie Hebdo Accomplish?

Published on by D. G. Hart171 Comments

The drive back from the annual American Historical Association meeting (and other points northeastern) brought the missus and me lots of coverage of the killings of editors and cartoonists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo yesterday in Paris. As unnerving and tragic as those deaths were and as close to the events as reporters still stood, the dominant narrative of the event was the need, courage, and danger of free speech. Many French and English journalists conducted interviews that indicated the enormous debt they owed to the editors, writers, and cartoonists of the magazine for standing up for free speech. In fact, the Protestant Federation of Churches in France issued the following statement:

We reiterate that the secular republic and its values, including freedom of conscience, democracy and press freedom remains for us the foundation of our life together.

This fairly modern, liberal, and republican line (it is striking to hear the French identify with “The Republic” while Americans who inhabit a republic of similar vintage talk about “The Constitution”) is fairly at odds with the experience of most modern, liberal residents of republics. None of us actually enjoys freedom of speech. Sean Michael Winters, for instance, noted that he is unwilling to use the freedoms he has:

I am not Charlie. I am not as brave as the editors at that newspaper were, continuing their satire even after the death threats and after their offices were fire-bombed. To point out another obvious difference, I am not a satirist and I do not go out of my way to poke fun at other people’s religion. But, they did and – you will pardon the expression – God bless them for it.

In other words, most people even in free societies and even when writing for the wider public censor their thoughts. From deciding not to tell your wife the truth about the chair she purchased to holding your thoughts about the pastor’s sermon, we do not live in a world that allows us to say whatever we think. Some people show more caution than others, and this is of course different from governments censoring citizens. But little in the reporting yesterday suggested any awareness of the layers of free speech.

What has already emerged, however, and this will likely continue for a while, is the chance of drawing attention to the inconsistency of those who condemn these killings. For instance, Mark Tooley observes that the World Council of Churches’ statement about the deaths stands in sharp contrast to the organizations former failure to uphold freedom of speech during the Cold War:

These statements are not bad, and Tveit’s affirmation specifically of the “freedom to print and publish” is especially notable. During its darkest Cold War days of accommodating Soviet Communism and its global proxies, the WCC was often scandalously silent about the freedom to print and publish, among many other freedoms suppressed by dictatorships.

At the risk of adding to such scapegoating, I can’t help but think about the complexity of freedom of speech when it comes to talking about race in the United States or to talk in general at most of the United States colleges and universities. Peter Lawler’s post about campus dissent stands in sharp contrast to outpouring of praise for freedom of speech (folks who talk about microaggressions and social sins should take note):

Now a big difference between the Communists and today’s politically correct is that the (typically perverse) nobility of the Old Left was that it was moved by the plight of people who had little to no property. And so they wanted to use the power of government to redistribute resources from one class to another. There’s still some of that idealism on campus, and even some professors who claim that they have the duty to be socialists to counter the capitalist propaganda that they say dominates the media and so much of ordinary life in America. The genuinely throwback socialists often love liberal education, and I often think I have more in common with them than with libertarian economists, despite the fact that the astute libertarian futurists have a better handle on what the future will probably bring.

Richard Rorty complained that when the Left went from being Old to New it lost interest in the issue of economic injustice and got about the business of eliminating every trace of cruelty and indignity — all the aggressions both macro and micro — from American discourse. Justice became making everyone — rich and poor, black white, straight and gay, and so forth and so on — absolutely secure in his or her freely chosen personal identity. Some of that progress has served the cause of decency, but it’s way out of control. Because the new political correctness reaches its height of self-righteous self-consciousness on campuses, it becomes pretty much unsafe to say anything judgmental or controversial or against reigning democratic and “extreme autonomy” prejudices.

During much of the press coverage yesterday I kept wondering whether someone would step up to explain how Charlie Hebdo’s provocations had actually helped French society. After all, if you provoke people to the point where the police (public servants) need to guard your offices, you might be more of a public nuisance than a cultural asset. Then again, and I don’t know the climate of French campuses, if residents of France enjoy more freedom than their fellow republicans in the U.S. to say what they think without fear of hurting hearers’ feelings, then Charlie Hebdo may have performed a valuable service.

Postscript: Michael Sean Winters added this comment in his praise for those who died yesterday:

The values of a culture that says it is fine to behead homosexuals are worse values than those of a culture that says it is not fine to behead homosexuals. The values of a culture that seeks to keep women in third-class status are worse than the values of a culture that seeks to open opportunities for women. The values of a culture that demands adherence to a strained, fundamentalist reading of a religious text are worse than the values of a culture that acknowledges pluralism and seeks to find peaceful ways for people of different religions to live together amicably. These values are not merely different. Cultural relativism only gets you so far. Our values, our liberal values, are better. I do not have to like this cartoon or that essay, I may regret the sense of license our commitment to liberty allows and even encourages, many and deep are my reservations about the seraglio of the Enlightenment, but I would rather be a citizen of the Fifth Republic of France than a slave in territory governed by ISIS. So would everybody except the evil and the deranged.

By that logic, Winters would also likely prefer to be a citizen of a libertarian U.S. than a member of pre-modern Christendom. In fact, he acknowledges that the history of Western Christianity has not always been appealing:

Just as Catholicism has had to break from its own barbarisms, haltingly to be sure, and insist that its faith be expressed in humane ways, indeed that inhumane expressions of the our Catholic faith are a contradiction of that faith, so too must our Muslim brothers and sisters find the arguments and the ideas and the critical mass of supporters to break their faith free from these murderers who claim to act in their name. The thing that we Catholics can do, especially those of us who are not afraid to call ourselves liberals, is create relationships with humane Muslims, work with them for the common good, highlight their culture and its contributions, and encourage them as they seek to remove the cancer that is currently eating away at their religion. We can share with them the ups-and-downs of our Catholic history in this struggle, noting that sometimes those ups-and-downs occurred in the same person, as when the venerable Saint Thomas More sent heretics to the flames. History, the catalogue of humanity, is itself a great humanizing force in any culture, whether its study prepares a person for a job in the 21st century marketplace or not.

Similar reservations haunt the performance of pre-modern Protestants. In which case, those of us Christians (Roman Catholic or Protestant) who enjoy the blessings of liberty need to do a little more reflection on where those freedoms came from. That they originated at the time of the founding of the American and French republics is not a reason to suggest that medieval Christendom or confessional Europe had nothing to contribute to the legal and political outcomes of the modern West. But the Council of Trent and the Westminster Assembly did not produce the Bill of Rights for a reason. And that reason should lead every modern Christian to express some gratitude (i.e. two cheers) for the Enlightenment.

The New Republic Is Dead. . .

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

Long live the New New Republic.

I remember where I was when I heard that Mike Schmidt was retiring from playing third base for the Phillies. I was in the bedroom of our Wheaton, Illinois high rise apartment. I still remember also where I was when Phil Hendrie announced he was leaving the airwaves (only to return and then leave for podcasting). I was battling a nasty cold that turned into walking pneumonia from the comfort of the Mayflower Park Hotel in downtown Seattle. More recently, I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Rob da Bank was leaving BBC 1 to be an irregular stand-in at the BBC 6 Mix.

So when the New Republic blew up a month or so ago, I again experienced that feeling of being deprived of one of those aspects of personal identity that had marked (all about) me since I started graduate school in Baltimore thirty years ago (when Omar Little was crawling around in diapers). Several bloggers have commented on the events that led long-time editors and staff to abandon the Ship New Republic. Among those comments were several reflections about how important the magazine had been in forming an intellectual outlook.

I first caught wind of the change from Michael Sean Winters who may be excessively self-referential:

The New Republic is dead, or at least it is now brain dead. Yesterday, editor Frank Foer and literary editor Leon Wieseltier resigned as the changes undertaken by owner and Facebook zillionaire Chris Hughes became so oppressively obnoxious, Foer and Wieseltier could no longer stay. Even as I write those words this morning, it is difficult to believe. Needless to say, this is also personal for me. Frank is a friend and Leon is a very good friend.

My indebtedness to Leon is enormous. In 1993, he approached me about writing a book review for him. I did not hold an academic position: I was the manager of the café at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café. But, I had gotten to know Leon over the years, he liked the way my mind worked, and he asked me to review a biography of Jose Maria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei. It was my first real foray into publishing. Leon was not an easy editor, which is one of the reasons he is a great editor. He re-worked my draft from top-to-bottom, demanded more analysis here, less verbosity there, and the end result, much improved from his editing, made it into his pages. It was, of course, a thrill to be published in the pages of the venerable TNR. Walter Lippmann had helped start TNR! All the great liberal icons of the twentieth century had been published in its pages. How many of the writers we all turn to – Chait, Hertzberg, Kinsley, Cohn, Berkowitz, Scheiber, Judis, Wolfe – had gotten their start at TNR or been introduced to a wider audience in its pages. But, the real thrill was not being associated with such luminaries. The real thrill was being published by Leon.

At National Review, Carl Eric Scott acknowledged his own intellectual debt to TNR:

A once-great institution, killed by a pair of lofo-pandering facebook-enriched millennial jerks. I here voice my gratitude to all of those who made the magazine central to my political education in the 1990s. I wouldn’t be who I am today were it not for TNR.

I stopped my subscription sometime in 2008, and had stopped eagerly reading the magazine around 2005 or so. And not too long ago, when I had thought about re-subscribing, I found myself dissuaded by articles like the one that stooped to smearing Scott Walker as a racist on the basis of no evidence related to the man himself. But a couple weeks ago, when I saw the magazine’s 100th anniversary issue, well, I just had to pick it up. It is worth getting, incidentally—there’s some interesting stuff about the early Herbert Croly years, an undoubtedly softened account of the conflicts between owner Marty Peretz and the more-regular liberals at TNR during the 80s through early aughts, and in any case, the issue’s now worth owning simply as a memento of a lost age.

I agree about the feel of the magazine for the last five years or so, but the 100th anniversary issue was worth the wait (even though I suspected the issue would be too self-congratulatory; the piece by Hanna Rosin on Stephen Glass was riveting).

Noah Millman (who is almost always on a roll) chimed in:

I would like to say that I’m shaken by the dramatic shake-up just announced at The New Republic, which sees Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier leaving the – well, I was going to say the magazine, but it isn’t a magazine anymore apparently, but rather a “digital media company,” whatever that is. TNR, after all, was the magazine that introduced me to public intellectual life. I read it in the school library in high school – no, actually, I devoured it. It was clever, but also serious – political, but also literary. And, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was hard to imagine a magazine having more influence on the shape of debate. The first iteration of my politics were substantially shaped by its sensibility.

For me TNR was liveliest when Andrew Sullivan was editor, but even running up to Andrew, the magazine was always provocative and sharp. If I am too snarky or sputten, I owe it in part to TNR where being argumentative was a virtue. Maybe Christians are not supposed to be that way. Of late, after bingeing on Portlandia, I wonder if certain sensibilities really are impossible for believers, say, coming up with a lesbian couple co-owning a feminist bookstore. If so, TNR transformed me in a less than sanctified way.

On the positive side, the so-called back of the book, the books and arts section was always worth reading in its entirety. Not only did the editor of that section, Leon Wieseltier, attract writers such as John Updike (to review painting exhibitions), or historians like Gordon Wood, or literary critics, James Wood and Louis Menand, but his coverage of the fine and popular arts and reviews of books was so well done that it made other magazines superfluous. One of the reasons I gave up on Books and Culture, for instance, was that in one year’s worth of TNR Wieseltier and company would cover twice (maybe three times) as much as Christianity Today’s venture into a publication dedicated to books.

I will continue with another year of TNR just to see what becomes of it. Chances are, though, that the glory days of TNR are behind not simply because of a change in editorial personnel but also because the entire landscape of magazine publishing has changed. In that regard, Noah Milman should have the last word:

Which brings me to the realm of culture, and the fabled back of the book. I should caveat right up front that TNR and Wieseltier did a wonderful job of covering a wide array of subjects, of finding talented young critics and promoting them, and engaging in intellectual debate across the landscape of culture and academia. But I still have two bones to pick with the encomia.

The first and easiest bone to pick is that there is a wild, robust and in many cases very high quality discussion going on right now across a multitude of outlets and covering any cultural topic you like. What is relatively absent in the internet era are two things: widely-recognized gate-keepers to curate that discussion, and any kind of revenue model to sustain it. These are not problems that Leon Wieseltier had any idea of how to solve. (Nor does anyone else – something Andrew Sullivan acknowledges in his own lament for passing of the “sugar daddies of yore.”)

I am very, very eager to find a solution to that particular problem. Here at TAC, I am a tireless advocate for more cultural coverage for its own sake. I produce a bunch of it myself on this blog, and some of it for the magazine. But I recognize that the prevailing structure of the internet makes it not only very difficult to justify from a revenue perspective, but very difficult to justify from a curatorial perspective – because it’s not clear that a magazine like TAC could achieve the status of a trusted curator of this kind of discourse even if it wanted to.

So, again, the nostalgia for Wieseltier’s back-of-the-book is, to some extent, a nostalgia for an information market structure that no longer exists rather than for something TNR was uniquely and selflessly committed to. Another way of putting this is: back when TNR was TNR, The New York Review of Books was still The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker was still The New Yorker.

We’re not in the hard-copy age any more, Toto.