I can remember the moment small literary magazines entered my life and established a subtle but dominating influence. I used to be talking with my dad about some classes I used to be taking at the tip of my undergraduate years, and I shared an concept that had recently popped into my head: “I need to begin a magazine. I’ll invite some friends who like to jot down and are into photography to feature their work. I’ll print 10 or 20 copies and see what happens.”
Surprised, he pointed at a maroon-covered, finely printed journal lying on his desk, the word Image emblazoned across the highest. Below the title, an outline: Art. Faith. Mystery. As the dean of scholars at a Christian liberal arts university, he knew his way around a landscape that I used to be just starting to roam.
The direction of my life was permanently altered at that moment. I discovered a world that took seriously the things I loved: faith, books, imagination, the creation of culture, and the event of craft. It lit a hearth in my chest.
But ten years later, it looks like that world is crumbling—or is a minimum of on quaking ground. In February, Image announced it was shuttering after 35 years of operation for financial reasons—after which, in March, joyfully reversed its announcement after an outpouring of support. Other small magazines and presses haven’t made the identical comeback, and Christians within the Visual Arts announced it was disbanding last 12 months.
From my vantage, these closures don’t show a scarcity of energy, talent, or interest in arts and literature within the church. In some ways, the humanities and faith movement—led by writers, painters, poets, and photographers who live by a drumbeat not often highlighted in Christian community—appears to be swelling to a crescendo.
But the shortage of institutional viability and support is palpable. Major streams that watered the literary and artistic ecosystem of the American church appear to be drying up abruptly.
Budding artists and seasoned writers feel left to fend for themselves, as seen in widely discussed reflections from Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Jen Pollock Michel on the publishing world. Creative gatherings for Christians are sometimes difficult to fund and organize; there’s a precarious feeling that their existence should be always justified. It’s no coincidence that a lot Christian writing today is in a private and confessional mode—there’s a quiet cry going up from artists in our pews to have real spiritual and aesthetic community.
Small magazines can fill that need, serving as “experiential labs and community hubs for rising and established writers and thought leaders,” said Sara Kyoungah White, a former editor on the Lausanne Movement who’s now a copyeditor at Christianity Today.
White found community, she told me, in small magazines like CT’s Ekstasis (the magazine that got here out of that conversation with my dad), Foreshadow, and Fathom. Writing in those pages allowed her to explore her faith through the sort of nuance and poetry which have grown rare in these didactic times. She could engage with the works of like-minded creatives and re-enter the literary and cultural landscape with a Christocentric lens. Such communities evoked those of artistic and literary greats like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and James Joyce, who gathered in the salons of Paris.
But you don’t must be a author or artist yourself to learn from flourishing Christian literary and artistic communities. “The best solution to take into consideration literary publications is as part of a bigger ecosystem of ideas,” said Paul J. Pastor, senior acquisitions editor at Zondervan, in an interview.
“Any ecologist will let you know that the resilience and vibrancy of an ecosystem is dependent upon the ‘little’ guys just as much as—and sometimes greater than—the ‘big’ guys,” explained Pastor. “Just like in a forest, where the ‘keystone species’ holding an ecosystem is usually a form of creature missed or invisible to most individuals, so there’s a particular and essential contribution of the small literary publication that may be essential and irreplaceable—and only fully seen by the broader collapses that follow when it goes away.”
Without that hindsight, though, institutional support for this type of community is usually a tough sell within the church. A literary magazine may not usher in latest converts or keep the church lights on. Why should we financially support work that doesn’t have quantifiable, utilitarian value?
Most succinctly, we must always do it to foster a vibrant and delightful culture within the church. God has embedded a hunger for beauty within the human spirit, and God’s own interest in beauty is clear in his Word. We see it within the artistic call of Bezalel to weave pomegranates with red, purple, and blue thread onto the robes worn into the Holy of Holies (Ex. 28:31–35; 35:30–35); within the masterful poetic structure of the Psalms; within the epic language of apocalypse and prophecy.
As Christians, it’s our responsibility to concentrate on how we’re satiating our hunger for beauty. Are we developing a taste for what is nice and an aversion to the acrid flavor of evil? Are we more influenced by beauty that orients us to the strange and unexpected work of God on this planet—or by political slogans and self-help books?
The power of the small literary magazine is in its ability to confront us with latest ideas, to expand our palates to the missed, the strange, the serendipitous, the delightful. This won’t ever be very measurable, but that doesn’t make it unnecessary. “The contributions of ‘small’ writers and literary publications are immense, but their influence could be difficult to trace,” Pastor told me. “You can’t understand how a picture or idea developed in a poem or short story may awaken something in a reader who, years later, will write or paint or talk or sculpt it out, perhaps for an audience of tens of millions, perhaps only for one person whose life could also be saved, and in turn—who knows?”
“But,” he added, “what such artists need, what such a movement needs, at all times, is a passionate and supportive audience.”
Groundbreaking storytelling requires backing and bulwarks. In the mid-Twentieth century, that looked like “grants, residencies, affiliations, and academic positions.” In the Renaissance, it was elite patronage. Perhaps now, we want a latest model to make room for what Anne Snyder, editor of Comment, in an interview called “the essential wrestling with tougher stuff: arguments, substantive debates, being unafraid to be political when essential, the hard calls that selecting the Jesus Way necessitates … a mix of cultural chutzpah and a enjoyment of the imago Dei.”
That may look like a frightening and even dangerous proposition, but Pastor is hopeful. “There is a latest generation producing absolutely remarkable work,” he said, “and while the organizations that support us are fragile, it has at all times been that way.” A century from now, he predicted, ours shall be remembered “as a renewal moment in Christian literature. And all of us get to take part in it.”
The ceaseless work of creation, education, and tending to the depths of the human spirit will proceed. But we are able to advance it with daring and inventive institutions tasked with bridging image and word, mind and spirit, for the sake of the church.
Humans will satisfy this hunger for beauty a method or one other. As God’s people, we must always host the feast.
Conor Sweetman is the director of innovation and collaboration at Christianity Today and editor of Ekstasis.
