Over the last three months, I’ve tried my best to post at least one thing a day to this site. I didn’t have any initial intention at the time, really, but it was something I read in James K. A. Smith’s “I Believe in Magazines” that gave me the nudge.
Smith’s take on the significance of magazines falls in line nicely with Alan Jacobs’ look at commonplace books and Andrew Sullivan’s thoughts on blogging. Originally given as a talk to “the Augustine Collective” of college journals with a Christian perspective, the essay lays out nine encouraging thoughts on why magazines are an important medium. And as so many things of worth, it starts out personal. Smith asserts:
Sometimes our callings know us before we know our callings.
From there, he revisits the significance of being an editor of a magazine in his own way in connection to BMX biking as a teenager. Now Smith edits Comment magazine, which is tied to his work as a teacher at Calvin College.
Smith sees magazines as a way of “filling the earth” with good things (in a nod to the creation account in Genesis 1). Magazines are ways to “extend the sacramental” like bodies extend the thoughts of the individual and the community. He encourages magazine writers and producers to create “conversations to be overheard” and to “always be editing” as those conversations take place.
But it’s his insistence that magazines are a way to “curate the world” that struck me as particularly significant. When Andrew Sullivan stopped blogging a few months ago, even those who served as his most vocal pushback were sad to see the end of what had become a way to massively curate the online world (something that blogging at its best does). But curating has a slant. Smith says:
Influential little magazines set the tone, chart a path, put issues on the map. In some ways, a good magazine “curates” the world from a stance of conviction. That means you need to have conviction; but it also means you need to be looking out on and engaging the world . . .
Invite your readers to see the world through the lens of your editorial vision, one that should be honed by the one who is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). A magazine is an ongoing way to cultivate a worldview by curating our perception of the world.
And so as juvenile as blog posts about comics or television or movies might be, it’s at least a small way that I can bring some things together and repackage them from my own perspective.
I encourage you to read the whole article here.
The television season is winding down, as is the current school year. I hope that means more meaty posts, more pointed thinking. We’ll see. That’s a big part of what blogs . . . and magazines . . . are about: what you see and showing what you see to others.
Space Enough, and Time 