We’re Back

“Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. …Disco was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever! It’s got to come back someday.”

From Whit Stillman’s film The Last Days of Disco (1998)

We were never as fun or as important as disco (and not nearly half as serious), but we have managed to come back. Almost improbably, I was introduced to a few sharp, young minds just as I was losing hope of ever resuscitating the Clarion Review, and had also grown old enough to let a lad’s dream float away with only tender regret. But there they were, ready and willing to give it a go.

We have spent the summer dusting off the Rolodex (see Wikipedia if you don’t know what that is) for new content – going to those places that we always have gone to find unexpectedly fresh material, sometimes by commissioning new pieces and other times by reprinting true things well said. We shall try to prevent more ink from being needlessly spilled.  So, as with our former print and web editions, the revived Clarion will publish new content when we cannot find it better said already (or cannot get the rights to reprint something, and so must try anew).

In the Clarion’s second life you can expect the same stream of quality original fiction and poetry and the same insightful (and occasionally incisive) commentary on the arts, faith, society, and even politics. We shall strive to publish well-known and amateur authors that share traditional Judeo-Christian understandings of life, culture, and existence: Christian humanists and their allies. Here it must be said that we rely on good contributions to keep the conversation going. Thus, we are looking for fiction, poetry, essays and book reviews that are consistent with our phronema or mindset.

The Clarion Review also continues to support a view of human life that takes the body seriously as being bound up in our existence. To this end, we shall remain a lively review of contemporary cultural issues, focussing on what it means to live in and as a body.

To whet your appetite, we are preparing the following for publication:

• Roger Scruton’s opera, Violet, including the libretto, sheet music and audio recordings, plus a short essay on the opera by the composer.
• A serialization of the novella ‘A Dove Descending’, also by Roger Scruton, in three parts plus a prequel.
• Essays by Vigen Guroian, Wendell Berry, Diederik Boomsma and Jonathan Price
• Reprints of classic Christian humanist texts
• Politics & Poetics, a peer-reviewed journal of the Clarion Review, which seeks to bring together these two Aristotelian conversations in the personhood of the political and literary animal.

In the coming months, we will be extending our editorial advisory board. Already Mrs. Annette Kirk and Prof. Vigen Guroian have graciously agreed to join. Our editors now include the new managing editor, Brian Lapsa, and a few of the Brothers Price, particularly Joseph and Andrew, who have taken on editorial duties. We are also seeking to expand this cohort. So, please apply.

Please come back regularly for a dose of humanism rightly understood – what could be called “incarnate humanism”—that seeks to coax the philosophy out of its secularist straightjacket. Maybe we can even help humanism again to become more of a lived ‘way’ rather than an abstract ‘–ism’. We hope you will join us in engaging very late modernity critically as active readers and thoughtful contributors.

 

Jonathan Price, Editor