Gail, I was delighted to see your sonnet at the top of page 20 in the new issue of First Things. Thanks for sending it. Your poem makes me look like a good editor.
Thanks, too, for your comment on my little epigram. It’s true that First Things has had a Catholic flavor in recent years, but as interim editor James Nuechterlein writes in this month’s editorial, the goal of First Things has always been to be an ecumenical journal. When it was founded, its editor, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, was a Missouri Synod Lutheran minister, and Nuechterlein, the co-founder, was a Lutheran member of the ELCA. Neuhaus’s conversion to Catholic priest changed his perspective a bit, of course. After his death, another Catholic, Jody Bottum (friend to a number of us here in the Sphere), assumed the editorship. And the journal’s editorial board contains a number of heavyweight Catholic thinkers such as Mary Ann Glendon, the recent US ambassador to the Vatican, and George Weigel, the official biographer of Pope John Paul II. But the board also includes a wide array of Jewish and Protestant members of various denominations. My little poem , for instance, was the effusion of a confirmed Lutheran.
Strangely enough, when I first met Father Neuhaus, the first thing he asked me was where I was from. When I told him I was living in Russellville, Arkansas, he told me his parents had been married there—and that in fact his father had been the pastor of the Lutheran Church there. When I recently checked the list of ministers who’d served in the Missouri Synod church my family now attends, I discovered we are attending his father’s church.
The new editor of First Things, who officially starts on April 1, is Rusty Reno. A fairly recent convert to Catholicism from the Episcopal Church, he is a sort of one-man ecumenical council in himself.
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Hybrid Mode
