I haven’t read the following essay for many years. I had assumed that it needed a great deal of commentary; after all, nearly twenty years have passed since Maclin and Karen Horton and I had composed what we half-jokingly called “our manifesto”. We have aged and changed, grown both wiser and in certain ways, less wise.
And we haven’t always grown in the same direction Our differences in outlook were pretty imperceptible by the time Caelum et Terra went to print. In the livelier, if less substantial, format of a weblog they are more obvious.
Not that a weblog is anything but a poor, insubstantial, substitute for a journal, which is a real physical thing you can hold in your hands. A blog is, however, cheaper and less time-consuming. And better than nothing.
But what strikes me, reading this after so many years, is how well it holds up. The nation has gone downhill, the culture continues its decline and fall. And we are not as idealistic.
Still, these words hold up well. We might nuance things a bit now, but we stand by the words which heralded our arrival.
We never had a large readership, and most Catholics, then and now, misunderstood what we were and are about.
But these things are still true.
The kingdom of heaven is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground and should sleep and rise day and night and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how.
Click below to read the original “manifesto.”
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[...] more on the mission of Caelum et Terra here and here, and Jeremy Beer’s excellent retrospective in The New Pantagruel is also worth [...]