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One of the more dramatic stories of my childhood concerned a magazine and the bargain my mother struck that made her a lifelong subscriber. Toward the end of the war—World War II, that is—a draft notice arrived for my father. Since he worked in a war-related industry and was the only support of my blind grandmother, his wife, and three daughters, he had long been deferred. Now a notice. While he appealed to the draft board, my mother promised God (or maybe our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility) that if his appeal were upheld, she would give money to the first person who asked her.
My father was deferred. The next person to come to our door was a salesman from Extension, a magazine reporting on Catholic home missions in Dakota, Alaska, maybe Kentucky—out there, far, far from Chicago. When I left home at 22, my parents were still getting Extension, and as far as I know, they still are.
They and so too their children were magazine readers. Magazines were often fodder for the debates my father and I had throughout my high school and college years—race and the civil rights movement was the chief topic then. Some of those magazines were Catholic, some were not. Many of them were a font of information and opinion, which kept my parents alert to shifts in religion, politics, and the union movement. Even better, they gave me a lot to argue about with my father.
When I say, as I often do, that magazines, especially journals of opinion, are a critical and intense form of adult education, it is this childhood experience, then my experience as an adult, my husband's, my children's, the experience of my friends and neighbors, my colleagues, and even strangers on the train that I draw upon. Even my grandson when a year old ate up Commonweal, while he ripped up Information Age.
What do I mean by a critical and intense form of adult education? Information, Formation, Conversation, and Persuasion are what journals of opinion are all about, and inevitably they are directed to adults who are already educated, mature, reflective men and women, adults who already have a worldview. Nonetheless, the outcome of their reading is the shaping and reshaping of their understanding of our world in the context of their deepest beliefs, the pulling apart and reintegration of their worldview. What does the world mean in light of my religious conviction? What do my religious beliefs mean in the world I live in now? Journals of opinion that write from within a religious tradition are few and far between, but they perform a critical function in bringing before their communities a continuing conversation about how to make meaning.
I believe all journals of opinion have had and continue to have an influence on our political, cultural, and religious life far out of proportion to the number of their readers, vastly out of proportion to their resources, and sometimes, though rarely, out of proportion to the worthiness of their opinions.
Of course, we are all opinionated. Journals of opinion, religious or political, exist not only because there are opinionated people who edit them but because there are readers who are also passionate proponents of an outlook—perhaps political, perhaps religious, perhaps literary. And their favorite journal of opinion serves as a compass in giving them their bearings and providing an orientation or reorientation to that outlook.
There is a kind of bargain, a social contract between reader and editor and it is this: a journal of opinion is the preeminent place in our pluralistic society, with its babble of voices and unexamined opinion, where a reader finds his or her deepest religious, political, and cultural understandings stretched, sometimes challenged, sometimes contradicted, sometimes confirmed. A worldview is reiterated and shared in a journal of opinion. It is a place, a community of voices, that over time creates a familiar, known way of seeing and talking about politics, about religious practices and beliefs, about social mores and monstrosities, about novels, movies, plays, indeed about how we live, and how we should live. Journals of opinion point to the links and connections among these cultural, political, and religious sensibilities. Hence the phrase "Commonweal Catholic" to characterize editors, writers, readers who have over almost eight decades gathered around its particular social construction of reality. So too, America, The Christian Century, The New Republic, The Nation, The Tablet (of London), Sojourners, The New York Review of Books, The Progressive, First Things, Crisis, Dissent, and Commentary.
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