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Why "Chapter 11" on the cover? Is this intended as a subtle reminder that, like virtually all publications of its kind, Books & Culture—if not exactly ready to file for bankruptcy—is in urgent need of your financial support? No, though if you renew your subscription for another three years and send in a handful of gift subs while you're at it, you will be contributing mightily to the health of the magazine. "Chapter 11" is on the cover because with this issue, we are embarking on our 11th year. Our first issue, September/October 1995, featured (among others) Mark Noll on Abraham Lincoln, Philip Yancey on Annie Dillard, and Frederica Mathewes-Green on icons. All three appear in this celebratory 10th anniversary issue, along with many other regulars and some newer voices as well.
Too many people have contributed in manifold ways to the first ten years of the magazine to single out a few of them here (may they receive this issue as a collective thank-you note), but the support of several institutions must be acknowledged. Without the significant help provided by the Pew Charitable Trusts from 1994 to 2000, Books & Culture would not exist. A grant from the Lilly Foundation in 1998 provided a strategic boost. Beginning three years ago and concluding this summer—a period during which the magazine industry reeled from the economic downturn—Baylor University offered crucial assistance. Finally, Christianity Today International has invested enormous resources to publish a magazine in which you can read Amy Laura Hall on "Holy Housekeeping," George Marsden on fundamentalism, Harry Stout reviewing Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's magnum opus, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview, Alan Jacobs on Harry Potter, Philip Jenkins on religion and the media, and Lauren Winner on Jan Karon's Mitford saga, to name a few of the pieces coming in our November/December issue. Thanks to these institutions, to the advertisers (with deep gratitude to those faithful ones who have been with us from the start), and, especially, to all our readers.
Two of the pieces in this issue make mention of the Butterfly Effect, identified by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s. Lorenz was simulating weather patterns on his computer (a clumsy ancestor of our fleet pcs, but a marvel in its own time) when he discovered—by accident—that miniscule differences between two starting-points produced huge divergences in the patterns that resulted. "He might as well have chosen two random weathers out of a hat," as James Gleick puts it in his account of Lorenz's discovery in Chaos: Making a New Science. What emerged from Lorenz's work was a new appreciation for "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," not only in the weather but in the world more generally, best known as the Butterfly Effect: "the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York."
A lot of foolishness has been spun out of notions of "chaos" and "complexity," as Eugene McCarraher observed in his dissection of Mark C. Taylor's Nietzschean boosterism ["The Confidence Man," July/August], and some of it has been wrapped around the Butterfly Effect. But there's an eminently practical lesson from Lorenz's findings. Our everyday world—the world in which we make countless choices, large and small, in the course of a week, a year, a lifetime—is marked by sensitive dependence on initial conditions. We need to keep two salient truths in mind. What we do (or don't do) will make a difference, far exceeding what we could imagine. (Somewhere in Brazil, a butterfly is fluttering near the table where a young woman sits in the sun, drinking coffee and turning the pages of this issue of Books & Culture.) Yet often the ramifying consequences of our actions, their place in the infinitely intricate unfolding of "cause" and "effect," will not be readily apparent to us—or to anyone else, except God. The result, a nice balance between awe and absurdity, is the nature of our condition this side of glory.
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