Welcome to the Caelum et Terra blog, where I hope some of the editors and writers of that late magazine will gather to continue the discussion we started there. I’ve consulted Daniel Nichols (the editor), Julianne Wiley, and a couple of other people who all agreed that it was a nice idea, but none of us wanted to invest the time and money (little enough of that required, of course, but still an inhibitor). As of now I am using the basic TypePad service, which allows only one author, so I will be the one actually posting material, but I hope and expect to hear from the others regularly, and all contributions will be plainly attributed. And naturally I would like to see a vigorous trade in comments.
What was C&T about? During the six or so years it was published, from roughly 1990 till 1996, I don’t know that even the founding editors could have given a clear or at least a simple answer to that question. To put it as broadly as possible, though, I think we all agreed in our desire to think about and to lay the groundwork for a culture rooted in the Christian faith. Being Catholics, and very conscious of what we believe to be very significant differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, we believed that these theological differences would play out rather differently in culture, and it was this Catholic thing that we wanted to explore. Yet we intended to be open to other traditions, and although we lamented the eclipse of hard-won Catholic wisdom we tried not to indulge in a too-sentimental view of a Catholic past that was of course, like the Catholic present and the Catholic future, never what it should have been.
Let me just free-associate for a moment: our vision was (and is) mystical, contemplative, distributist, agrarian, sacramental, ecumenical, aesthetic, traditionalist, and progressive. Note the last two: there are significant political differences among us, but we all believe that the Catholic faith is simultaneously the most conservative and the most revolutionary force on earth. And we agree that there really is a culture of death growing in the world, and that Christianity naturally tends toward the development of a culture of life.
That will be enough for now. The blog page is live but empty at the moment, and I need to put something out there. You can find out more about the magazine here, where a number of essays from it are archived.
As I learn more about the options available in TypePad, I expect to modify the design of this page. Please email me with any opinions as to readability (or leave them in the comments). I have serious doubts about this light type on dark background, but most of the other templates were worse (C&T somehow is not meant to be viewed in pastels). Comments are open.
–Maclin Horton
A pox upon your narcissistic coterie of elderly baby-boomers.
Good Evening,
This is my second attempt: I tried to ‘Preview’ my first effort and was anihilated.
Although my eyesight is not good and I do not like reading from a screen, your blog site is not bad: I’ll give it 6/10 for readability.
Regarding something in your blog: I shudder to hear on all sides ‘culture of this’ and ‘culture of that’; and specifically I consider that the phrase ‘culture of death’ is something of a Catholic cliché. I’m blowed if I can see what it means. (It might be used, I suppose, of certain times and places in the Middle Ages, but that doesn’t help much.) ‘Canteen culture’ I do understand.
Enough. (The original version was longer.)
I fear I may be classifiable with those mentioned in the previous comment, which, I venture to think, though lacking finesse, may not wholly lack insight.
Keep up your good work.
Welcome. I, for one, lament the demise of _Caelum et Terra_. I keep the back-issues.
When we started reading CetT we were a newly married couple deciding how we would live our lives as spouses and parents. It was a time for deciding which ideals to strive for. Fourteen years, and seven kids, later, that time is over. We’ve set the patterns of our life. It doesn’t look much like the ones we were after.
So my relationship to the ideas of CetT is going to be different now, as I revisit them through your blog. Still, I will read what you post here, and I wish you well.
I never read CetT, and have been a Catholic less than a year, but I enjoyed your posts immensely and the vision you stated coincides very much with my thinking at the moment.
I will return.
Re the design: I used the same template set for my homeschooling blog (berkman.typepad.com/aude_sapere/ and just gave it up as not being very readable (even to me, the writer). The links, in particular, are difficult to see. So I switched to a template with a white background and am much happier, even though the look isn’t as….well…mellow.
Thank you for the comments, all. I’ll have a bit more to say about the culture of death thing, f. I think The Inscrutable once wrote to the magazine–sounds familiar. In any case, who am I to argue with the Inscrutable?
Abigail, your name is familiar. Rest assured, many of us are set in patterns of life which are not necessarily what we envisioned 10 or 20 years ago. The whole agrarian thing that some CetT people pushed was really pretty much of a flop–hardly anybody actually did it, and there are a lot of good reasons for that. I myself admitted a long time ago that I’m really an average middle-class American. Still, there is something deeply amiss in that culture, and I continue to flay away at trying to figure out how to live in it as a Catholic, and how it might be made more hospitable to the Faith.
Welcome to the Church, Janet. I’m a convert of some 20-plus years, and although I have a large repertoire (sp?) of reasons to be unhappy with it, I wouldn’t be anywhere else, and, God willing, never will be in this life. Thanks for the advice on the look of the blog–will experiment some more. Yours looks good (I’ll have to go read some more there–looks interesting) but those kinds of colors don’t seem right for this, somehow.
New Blog
The Caelum et Terra Blog Thanks to Dawn Eden for the heads up….
I am delighted to see a Caelum et Terra blog. It can’t have been much more than ten years ago that my pitch to write about the use of the Internet by Catholics was turned down by the C&T editor with a brusque note to the effect that such modern technology was more to be deplored than celebrated.
And here we are today.
Welcome!
Tom, that’s really funny.
Some interesting-looking blogs you folks have. Too many blogs, too little time.
Caelum et Terra
Caelum et Terra, “the late and occasionally lamented magazine” by that name, has now ascended further into the aetherial realm of the internet with a blog authored by some of its former ringleaders who are still “squabbling toward a Catholic…