The New Yorker, Pope Francis, and Theology under Fire

I’ve long been a fan of The New Yorker, but the recent article about Pope Francis, “Who Am I to Judge” by James Carroll, has touched me more deeply than any magazine article in recent memory.  Perhaps this is because Carroll once studied for the priesthood, is a fine writer, and seems to understand Catholic dogma at its roots.  Perhaps it is because the piece is a welcome respite from the kind of hagiography we have seen in Time Magazine and much of mass media since Francis’ ascension to the papacy.  Perhaps, as an Irish Catholic who has been a foot-soldier in the culture wars and wrote a PhD dissertation on the Catholic imagination, I badly needed a fresh look at a church organization that has become anathema to many for its handling of the crimes against children.

When the Pope responded to a question about homosexuals with the remark:  “Who am I to judge?” the various factions lined up as expected.  Some saw this as opening the door to the gay community.   Conservative clergy, led by New York’s Cardinal Dolan, who seemed to be everywhere, responded that it was a matter of tone, not a shift in theology.  Carroll’s reading is a little more subtle in that he suggests Francis “unilaterally declared a kind of truce in the culture wars that have divided the Vatican and much of the world.”  But Carroll reminds us that in a less-known interview Francis calls homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil” and the inclination “must itself be seen as an objective disorder.”  And these remarks are consistent, in language if not in tone, with what Francis said when he was Archbishop of Buenos Ares.

The New Yorker piece also reminds us that there has been nothing subtle or understated about his remarks concerning the Institution Church.  Francis denounced the “psychology of princes” before new bishops last fall.  He denounced episcopal careerism as “spiritual adultery,” a “form of cancer.”  As Carroll notes, clearly there is more than a tonal shift when Francis, in an open letter to an Italian journalist, says: “I would not speak about ‘absolute’ truths, even for believers ….  Truth is a relationship.  As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one’s own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.”  The New Yorker writer suggests that the Pope “violated a set code of Catholic ethical and discourse” in his reference to moral relativity.  The Pope would expand on this. “The view of the Church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or difference understanding is wrong.” 

Sooner or later all discourse leads to the central tenets of Church doctrine.  One gets a sense from listening to Cardinal Dolan and others that we should indeed applaud what Francis has to say but at the end of the day, the Church should be understood as “semper idem”—always the same.   The good man can make changes at the pastoral edges but nothing in the long run will change.

However, Carroll reminds us that the “Church has made profound doctrinal changes in living memory.  In 1964, the council repudiated a millennium-long tradition of ‘No Salvation outside the Church’.”  That formulation dates at least to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215…. The Vatican overturned the doctrine by affirming the primary of conscience—a doctrine Francis has reiterated.”   Even “more momentous is the council’s rejection of the ‘Christ-killer’ slander against the Jews, which has its roots in the Gospels.”  Carroll writes that “None of the potential changes to doctrine facing the contemporary Church compare with the depth of this revision.”      

At the end of the day, Pope Francis will likely be judged by how he responds to priest sexual-abuse.  He has established a commission of priests, nuns, and lay experts to address these issues.  There is no indication that the commission will look at the Vatican or bishops’ involvement.  Pressure on the Vatican to do just this is coming from a lot of places, including the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of Children.  In an unusually blunt and sobering report released at the end of January 2014, the UN Committee states that the Holy See hides behind Canon Law and places obedience to the Pope above the protection of children.  The report states that tens of thousands of children have been abused by clergy and the Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes.  In fact, there is a code of silence around this abuse.  Abusers are rarely reported to civil authorities.  Accordingly the commission to investigate these crimes should include civil society and victims.  The U.N. urges the Church to consider sexual abuse a crime and not some vague “defect against the moral” order, as the Church has defined it.  Canon Law should be changed to reflect the reality.

Given the popularity of the new Pope, the UN report came as a shock to many, not only because of the charge that the Vatican is hiding behind Canon Law but also because the report included criticisms of the Church’s position on homosexuality, gender equality, birth control and abortion.  It is very rare for the UN to comment on religious doctrine.

The Pope has directed dioceses to distribute questionnaires to parishioners about divorce, birth control, and gay marriage.  According to Carroll, “When Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, the Secretary General of the Synod, was recently asked if remarried divorcees might be admitted to the sacraments, he replied, ‘The fact that it has been included in the questionnaire means it’s going to be looked at, and the intention is to discuss the issue without any taboos, otherwise it would not have been mentioned.’”  Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland, quoted in the Irish Times, suggested “This is a great opportunity for Francis.  Please, let us not have a bunch of men who have deliberately chosen not to have families tell us as members of families how we’re going to live our family life.  Please, let us have a broad-ranging discussion in which people who have real experience of family life lead the reflection.”

I wrote after returning from Italy last fall about how the Catholic Church, surrounded by such lushness and lustiness in art and architecture, has never found a way to let a full feminine impulse into its teachings.  Certainly Mary, the Mother of Christ, has an exalted presence but she was ever virgin, a perpetual virgin.  The Church tried to imbue its theology formally with the feminine principle by announcing The Immaculate Conception (1845) and the Assumption into Heaven (1950) as dogma.  These seem rather late in a 2000-year history.  This full article can be found at www.medium.com.

In explaining much of the conflict and ambivalence in the current Church, James Carroll quotes Stephen Colbert, speaking about Francis at the Al Smith dinner.  “I believe the Pope is infallible.  But he’s also wrong about a lot of things.”

That issue might be the least of the Church’s doctrinal worries.  Colbert is joking but his humor finds support in a recent poll by Univision, the U.S. Spanish-language network that confirms what has been long assumed:  most Catholics in the developed world are at odds with the Church over gay marriage, contraception, divorce and women’s admittance to the priesthood.  The Church has already pivoted in its outreach to the souls in Latin America and Africa where the laity is more in tune with Catholic doctrine.

Colbert has his work cut out. 

New U.S. Soccer Magazines, the Pele Effect, and Leggy Data Points

I’m British by birth and have kicked something ever since I could walk. And I have been waiting since coming to America as a teenager for soccer to become mainstream in this country.  While in the Navy in Asia, I looked forward to traveling to Hong Kong because the folks there at least knew what to do with their feet.  I stayed in the hunt, starting a soccer team at a small state college in Pennsylvania.  My brother was the first player signed for the fledgling University of Wisconsin-Green Bay soccer team.  My daughter played varsity for the University of Pittsburgh.  We’ve all done our share of coaching.

U.S. women’s soccer, led by the brilliant Mia Hamm and a strong contingent of female college and professional soccer players, captured the imagination of America and the world during the last decade of the 20^th century and early in the 21^st.   This represented massive, community-level enthusiasm in the very best sense of the words.  I loved attending these events with my daughter and her friends.  I loved this muscular expression of the feminine. 

Our collective hopes for English football, American-style, were raised when Brazil’s Pele’ came out of retirement in 1975 to play for the New York Cosmos for three years.  Even at thirty-five, Pele was a wonder to watch and helped soccer for a period attract national television and celebrity coverage, but the top down approach didn’t work either.  It would be another twenty years before the country was ready for the sport.  The North American Soccer League celebrates its 19^th anniversary in 2014, a longer tenure than any other U.S. soccer league.

The New York Times noted that NBC has paid a record $250 million for broadcast rights to every English Premier League game for the next three years.  The Times also notes that soccer journalism lags its foreign peers with only one magazine, Soccer America, in business since the 1970's.  Now two soccer quarterlies, Eight by Eight and Howler, have joined the fray.  A third called XI is said to be experiencing financial difficulties.

I think that most special-interest magazines in America have come into being when there were rising consumer and business interests in the sector.  Certainly this was true of Runner’s World in the 1970's and Bicycling Magazine, where I served as editor and publisher during the relaunch in the 1980's and 1990's.  Growing interest in health and fitness was matched by upscale consumer products from Nike, Trek and others and a boom was born.  We’ve seen this happen in America before, such as a generation earlier when returning GI’s who had learned a little about mountain skiing in combat brought their experience and enthusiasm back to the states.  Ski and Skiing magazines were a by-product of these World War II activities.

So the historical parallels for the growth of soccer magazines in American are well-known.  As noted, youth soccer has been flowering for a generation as has collegiate soccer.  Television—and that means major advertisers in tow—have embraced the sport.  NBC is providing delicious, understated coverage of the best Premier League Soccer games.  Fox, a little more chatty, provides the best of the European leagues. The general optimism about the sport, worldwide, is partly fueled by the fact that the World Cup is being held in Brazil in June of this year.  Billions are expected to watch this extravaganza in part because Brazil is considered the spiritual home of the beautiful game.  This is a bit of a fantasy because Brazilian players are often overrated.  But so are the New York Yankees.

The new soccer magazines, though currently exhibiting modest plans, are run by management with deep experience in publishing, including at Esquire, National Geographic, and GQ.  The NYT piece reveals that Howler “got its start with $69,000 from Kickstarter and ‘pretty sizable’ support through advertising by Nike and beIN Sport, the Al Jazeera-affiliated sports network.”

These magazines share a common theme:  that US soccer has been largely ignored by US print media and that is true enough.  Given the long slog soccer in the states has undergone, I wonder whether fine journalism and splashy layouts are enough to draw in the finicky American crowd.  After all, soccer is not three yards and a cloud of dust.  It is about finesse, the ability to run on average a 10-12K race each game, and more than a little understanding of geometry.

I’m currently reading Soccernomics, a splendid, NYT best-selling book that examines soccer from an empirical standpoint, relying on data rather than truisms and old world utterances offered by aging white coaches about a game they apparently don’t know that well.  The authors’ opening salvo makes the point.  Researchers at a large club looked at more than four hundred corner kicks and concluded that “the most dangerous corner was the ‘inswinger’ to the near post.”  They took this finding to the club’s manager, who was an ex-player who knew from his field experience that an ‘outswinger’ was more effective.  End of story!  This represents the book in miniature.

Authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski see English and European football, with some exceptions, as a century-old game that has changed little in the way owners and managers view the sport.  So clubs continue to overvalue older players, certain nationalities, and high school stars.  And they frequently prefer to hire blondes, another mistake.  The authors suggest that teams might be better off if managers were hired through the wisdom of the crowds or perhaps not at all.  They offer a ton of data to support this thesis.

English and European football are undergoing changes that the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball captured about the 2002 Oakland Athletics.  Hamstrung with a tight budget in a small market, the owner decided to rely on data rather than the intuition and experience of coaches.  The rest is history, more or less.

The authors note that it is a little surprising that soccer has been so adverse to studying data because the sport, like baseball and football, is all about the numbers.  We’ve heard the lament before.  Why sully a beautiful game, any beautiful game, with attention to cold, hard numbers.  The authors suggest that when England loses a penalty shootout in a World Cup quarterfinal, instead of throwing beer glasses at the TV, fans might temper their disappointment by reflecting on the nature of the binomial probability theory.   

The big clubs in particular are relying less on gut and more on data.  The authors report that AC Milan’s in-house medical team, by studying the data, could predict with 70% accuracy whether a player would get injured.  The joke is that this lab has discovered the secret of eternal youth.  Not quite, but they seem to have a pretty good idea when a player is ripe for the transfer window.  For me, one of the most interesting chapters was on game theory and the penalty kick.  The best soccer players have internalized a form of game theory and on their run-up to the penalty kick they still don’t know whether the ball is going to the left or right of the goalie.  Talk about a random sequence.

If I was editing a new magazine for the burgeoning soccer crowd in the U.S., I would start with great journalism and splendid graphics, but I wouldn’t forget the numbers and the data that feeds hardcore, passionate fans.  Or the discussion of the soccer psychology, mythology, economics, and yes, theology, found in this precious book that turns conventional soccer wisdom on its head.

The authors of Soccernomics write that “Until very recently, soccer has escaped the Enlightenment.”

Now that’s a story with legs.

(This post is dedicated to my brother Desi McCullagh, recently deceased.  He was a life-long soccer enthusiast and coach who played for various amateur clubs, during stints in the Army and Marines, and for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.  He was my soccer confidant.)

Gunning for the Truth

We know that large circulation, general-interest magazines (think Life, Family Circle, TV Guide, Reader’s Digest, etc.) will continue to go out of business or significantly decline in value while smaller circulation, special-interest magazines, whether about boats, bikes, or cool tools, will tend to survive.  The reason for this is that the latter tend to generate proportionately more circulation revenue than their larger sisters.  Their readers tend to be very loyal.  And the magazines generally enjoy a perfect intersection of editorial and advertising content.  In many special-interest magazines, editors are critiquing their advertising base and tend to do so gingerly.  Products from advertisers are frequently reviewed and rarely given a thumbs-down.

As a long-time editor and publisher of special-interest magazines, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with this.  After all, most products coming on the markets in these sectors have been vetted pretty carefully.  Often technical editors are involved in improving a product in beta before it comes to market.  I’ve done this with bikes, running shoes, fitness gadgets, cross-country skis and sports apparel.  When I was involved this way, I always made sure the readers knew.

Back in the day when I was editor and publisher of Bicycling Magazine, my naive position was that advertisers should want to be in the magazine because of our large circulation, editorial authority and reader engagement.  But there were always fires to put out.  I remember the call from the President of Campagnola in Italy telling me that he was cancelling all their advertising because I was showing favoritism towards Shimano, the Japanese maker of bicycle components.  I replied that Shimano was aggressive in product development and bringing new technologies to market.  He replied that Campagnola had invented the bicycle derailleur, quick release wheel mechanism, and so on.  I traveled to Vicenza, Italy, to change his mind, but he didn’t budge.  Cycling history hung over the meeting room like a medieval shadow.

I used to do the morning television circuit, appearing many times on the Today Show, Good Morning America, and whatever the CBS show was called at the time.  After an appearance on the Today Show where I showed some of the hot new bikes and equipment, including products from the Trek Bicycle Company in Wisconsin, I received a call from Richard Schwinn, who was presiding over a failing giant of a company.  He castigated me for showcasing foreign imports on the morning show and Trek in particular, based right up the road from Schwinn’s Chicago home.  Schwinn pulled all their advertising.  I have studied the sad Schwinn decline and detected without pleasure a large dose of vanity in that fall.

This kind of push and pull has been going on at special-interest magazines for years. Not infrequently, the threat of legal action hangs over the editorial meeting.  I recall when Bicycling was doing impact tests on bicycle helmets with the help of a university, the Bell Helmet company heard about this and threatened to sue and pull all advertising.  Our chief executive stood four-square behind the editorial decision.  That is how it is supposed to work.

I was deeply disturbed, though hardly surprised, when I learned that the Guns & Ammo journalist Dick Metcalf had been fired because he stated in an editorial that “all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.”  This was in October 2013.  According to a recent NYT piece, “Banished for Questioning the Gospel of Guns,” “The backlash was swift, and fierce. Readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions.  Death threats poured in by email.  His television program was pulled from the air.”  Two gun manufacturers threatened to cancel their advertising if Metcalf continued to be employed by InterMedia Outdoors, the parent company. 

The NYT piece was written two months after the fact but offers a fresh perspective.  Even given the historically “close” relationships between special-interest magazine editorial departments and their advertisers, the banishment of Mr. Metcalf from the magazine and the industry for speaking the truth seems extreme.  After all, he correctly pointed out that all constitutional rights are regulated.  We still can’t cry “fire” in a crowded theater, no matter what the arsonists say.

It would be easy to point the finger at a gutless InterMedia Outdoors, a company I know and have worked with over the years.  After all, the editors are giving the readers precisely what they want.  The editors are giving advertisers precisely what they want.  From the outside, it seems like a pretty good business.  There is little or no separation of church and state and few involved seem to care.  Anyway, sponsored content is all the rage these days, the next money machine.  Or perhaps this is Duck Dynasty all over again.

In psychological terms, when I am seized by a powerful emotion, I am said to be caught in an autonomous feeling-toned complex, no less intense than if I was an ancient stammering at the altar of a nature god.  This is my personal unconscious at work.  I exaggerate, of course, but there is a kind of religious zealotry on the part of gun absolutists who seem to believe in the gospel of the gun, as if this language has divine origin and can never be abridged.  

As part of an academic project, I have read hundreds of articles, opinion pieces and blog posts about gun control, all written after the Sandy Hook murders.  On the whole I found them thorough, thoughtful, and logical, all begging for action.  A year later, I have to admit that reasoned argument will do little to change the discussion of guns in America. The primary reason for this is that the gun and the idea of the gun are so embedded in the American psyche and nature; in our history, theology, psychology and mythology.  As psychologist Carl Jung might say, guns are an inseparable part of our personal and collective unconscious.  These are the areas in which we have to probe if we want to shed some light on the debate.

I have tried to do this with an epic poem, “The Archetype of the Gun,” that I hope captures some of this complexity.  It’s an easy read, if I say so myself; and available on Amazon. http://ow.ly/skcqI

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Buzzfeed, the Media Apocalypse and Devouring the Young

When I was a senior undergraduate, I participated in an oratorical contest in Pennsylvania between Christmas and New Year.  We were asked to address challenges associated with the coming year.  Since I was a hot-shot, full of myself, and admiringly sardonic, I introduced my speech with a poem that began: “The New Year engulfs us with startling ease, so down with man and down with the trees.”  I got second place because I used poetic sleight of hand rather than cool, hard logic to make my case.  One judge suggested that I might have been more sensitive to the season, including the Incarnation and Winter Solstice; after all, I was young and there would always be plenty of time for the Apocalypse.

The Apocalypse has finally arrived, courtesy of Buzzfeed, which just published a piece about “How the Media Will Report the Apocalypse: It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”  Now with its WTF, LOL, and OMG prompts and snarky, hyperbolic edge, Buzzfeed is not exactly The Onion or even Jonathan Swift, but it nails the tone and voice of major media reporting on the mutant zombie invasion and parsing out blame.  For the NYT, the end is “a regrettable and premature finale,” though an Op-Ed piece agonizes over a ruined wedding.”  Britain’s The Guardian reports that Islington in North London, my birth town, is up in flames and the BBC, true to its mission until the very end, is giving the zombies equal media time.  A piece on a fashion guide for surviving the toxic wasteland might not be over the top.  Of course, with electronic communications unplugged, it is perfectly reasonable for the NSA to be shooting down carrier pigeons.

Britain’s Daily Mail reminds us that they “Bloody Well Told You” that the welfare state, immigration, single mothers, trade unions, gay marriage, the war on Christmas, and Bulgarians would bring about the end of civilization.  For Fox News, there is only one word for it:  Obamegeddon.  MSNBC, trying hard to be relevant, blames the right wing zealots for cutting funding for anti-zombie programs.  Reddit wants our help in finding these creatures but only if one has a degree in forensics or owns at least one box set of The Walking Dead.

“Modern Farmer” reminds us that our money is worthless; only goats matter.  True to form, NPR goes on a pledge drive, pleading: “For the love of God, send us Guns.”  And TMZ shows us Ryan Gosling’s disembodied skull.  Though I gave this effort a “W,” or Winner, the satire grows stale towards the end, perhaps because much of what is parodied is already considered a bit of a joke by many Americans.   A reasonable response to the Fox blather about the War on Christmas or the fact that Santa Claus is white might be to watch the Daily Show.  The very unfunny Karl Marx is quoted as saying: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, than as farce.  Perhaps the same can be said of our political discourse.

After 9/11, Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter said on September 18, 2001, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.”  In 2011, Michael Hirschorn in New York magazine wrote that Carter was trashed for his remarks.  The Onion and Saturday Night Live were back at the humor and irony game by October.   At that time, Hirschorn raised the question of what irony really means and suggested that perhaps we were too used to the reflexive, postmodern irony found in Seinfeld and the Simpsons to assign 9/11 to our collective psyches the way we have done with Pearl Harbor and other events.   Or maybe we were too caught up in our webby world of self-indulgence.

Hirschorn writes that, after John Stewart, “It is hard to cite an influential author, essayist, blogger, artist, or musician who has brought the full range of ironic whizbangery … against the very-more-powerful political-financial complex that is dragging this country to Depression-era levels of inequality.”  This was written more than two years ago and retains more than a ring of truth.

Hirschorn seems prescient about our Brave New Alice-in-Wonderland World.  “It may be the confluence of 9/11 and the dominant culture of webby self-expression that may have dealt irony a double death blow.  The habit of retailing one’s innermost thoughts and feelings, now abetted by Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, was born in the ashes of 9/11.  They are mediums that repel the ironists and embrace the earnest-ists in a warm, gooey, communal hug (insert emoticon here).”

The Buzzfeed piece suggests that anything can be parodied because we live in a viral, 24/7 world where up is down and fictions are treated as fact.  This is our existential plight.  We see this in our politics, where there exist few mediated, agreed on truths.  Or worse, truth become personalized, solipsistic and narrow, an invitation for us to act like one of Sherwood Anderson’s grotesques; I believe in one and only one truth and that truth is me.  Hit the Like button if you agree.

Irony is still very much with us, but it’s the situational ironies found in the old Seinfeld episodes that survive in many incarnations.  It’s been almost three hundred years since Jonathan Swift published his A Modest Proposal, suggesting that one way to solve Ireland’s problems of famine, poverty, and finances was to eat its young, with a one-year-old considered to be the most nourishing, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.  Published under the name Dr. Swift and presented as a very sober, logical, philosophical treatise aimed at preventing children of the poor from becoming a burden on parents and nation, this broad satire was a nicely cloaked criticism of the Catholic Church, wealthy landowners, the ruling class and a nation that in a sense was already eating its young.  Swift took full aim at the powers that condemned the young to a life of poverty and a Church that enshrined this condition in its theology.

The good news is that this book is no longer on the list of banned books, having been replaced by books about sex.  Sadly, few people seem to read this slim volume except English professors who still squeeze meaning from this modest tome, enduring any hardship to grab that last shot at tenure.  Even better news is that A Modest Proposal has entered the English language as a metaphor and a conceit, spawning thousands of examples of modest proposals dealing with everything from racism on campus, to reducing Mexican illegals and mother-in-law visits.  Not surprisingly, this metaphor has also entered the gun control debate with one blogger, sounding very much like an NRA meme, suggesting after the Newtown murders that children should carry guns to school and also be taught to gang-tackle armed gunmen.  We learn through some interlocutor that this advice, in the spirit of Swift’s pamphlet, was meant to be ironic.  I missed it entirely.

Swift might not be pleased that we are still consuming our young.

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Time, and Time Inc., Marches On

As a child of war, a veteran, and a long-time foe of American military adventurism, I take special, private note when war anniversaries come around.  This year, I thought a lot about Pearl Harbor, perhaps because I am increasingly hammered on social media with commands that tie my support of veterans to the Like button.

I have been to and sailed past the Arizona Memorial many times, and I swear that there is no quieter or more prayerful place on earth as when a Navy ship passes and honors the men entombed in the Arizona’s hull.  I have rarely experienced such godly silence, except perhaps in the catacombs in Rome.

On Veterans Day, I will buy a poppy from the VFW guy outside of ShopRite and probably will keep it forever.  This is the shorthand shared by those who have served.  I recall meeting an in-law years ago and he asked me, what war?  I replied Vietnam.  When I asked him, what war?, he simply said: The Big One.

I’m currently reading The Guns of Last Light, the award-winning account by Rick Atkinson about the war in Western Europe, 1944-45.  We are coming up on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, an event well documented in books and film.  Social media, not so much.  According to one account I read, most Americans consider the Battle of the Bulge a war with their girth and weight, suggesting the Atkinson book, even with its weight and textual girth, might be a useful stocking stuffer. To be on the safe side, we might also include Heller’s Catch-22, Mailer’s Naked and the Dead, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five so we are reminded of the horrors, miscalculations, and utter randomness of war.

At this time sixty-nine years ago, all seemed quiet on the Western front.  Few in the Allied High Command thought that the Germans would make a major push west into Belgium and Luxembourg. Small tokens of Christmas were springing up.  In the last week of December, Time magazine chose Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme commander, as its “Man of the Year.”   The cover photos showed the commander with legions of soldiers stretching into the distance.  The facts on the ground were much more confused and bloody.

As I’m writing this, Time magazine announced Pope Francis as its 2013 Person of the Year on the Today Show with Edward Snowden the runner-up.  Pope Francis received the award due to his efforts to change the tone of the conversation inside and outside the Catholic Church, nudging the Vatican away from its role as a theological police force.   I have written a number of pieces about some of the theological, cultural, and psychological issues concerning Pope Francis.  They are posted at www.medium.com.

Thank goodness for the sobriety of the Time magazine editors, who paid little or no attention to the Reader Poll that put Miley Cyrus in the running.  Next year they might want to consider a venue other than the Today Show, where there seemed more interest in the Digital Dance Off Awards, including the Harlem Shake that the Today staff has immortalized.

Or perhaps not.   It seems inevitable that social media will eventually play a much more vital role in the Person of the Year choices, likely hurried by the spin-off of Time Inc. from the parent in early 2014.  Just how much the world could change for the ninety-year-old Time Magazine can be found in a recent article by Allan Sloan, an editor-at-large at Fortune.cnn.com, a Time Inc. property.   Sloan looked closely at the Securities and Exchange Commission filing for Time Inc., his employer, before it is spun out of its parent company, Time Warner.  I followed his advice and conducted a deep dive into this weighty document.

 Documents for SEC are written in a kind of code by a cadre of lawyers who take all the fun out of a spin-off by rattling off an endless list of risks that might scare away even the boldest investor.  So, if I was looking for poetry, this was not the place to come.  But nonetheless, there is drama here.  Sloan, who is writing about his boss, reports that “three top Time Inc. executives (all of whom are now former Time Inc. executives) had made deals to get seven-digit bonuses if the spinoff took place.  Other Time Inc. executives may have similar deals.”

On its face, the document raises questions about the propriety of those negotiating a deal having a financial stake in the outcome.  Sloan calls this a “conflict” and he’s absolutely right.

Sloan also points out that Joe Ripp, “who is leading a company that says in the filing that ‘We are committed to pursuing operational efficiencies and cost leadership,’ got $7.5 million of stock and options (vested at $1.5 million a year for five years) as a ‘make whole’ deal for what he left behind at his previous employer.”  Time Inc. employees will not be pleased that Ripp just announced Time Inc.’s 401K company match is being reduced from 7% to 5% in 2014.  

Time Inc. has taken its share of whacks over the last decade or so for bad management and an anemic digital strategy.   Maybe so, but it’s been something of a cash cow for Time Warner.   Sloan’s brilliant analysis of the SEC documents shows “that for the past three years, virtually all the division’s operating cash—a $1.42 billion out of $1.456 billion—has gone to Time Warner.  That’s 97.5%.  I seriously doubt that the services Time Inc. has gotten from Time Warner for things like human resources begin to balance the scales.”

The industry chatter about the spinoff has largely been about how much debt Time Warner will saddle the new entity with.  That is not clear from the document.  Sloan wasn’t able to find out, but notes it could be as much as $500 million in deferred subscription liabilities alone (magazines people have paid for but not received).  As the writer notes, it is this kind of liability that can sink a business.  Other estimates put the number closer to $1 billion.

  Capital New York, quoting Time Inc. chief content officer Norm Pearlstine, reports that the company will continue staff cuts into next year.  The language of the SEC documents suggests that the next round of cuts could be greater than the 500 positions eliminated in early 2013.

The touching essay Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs wrote about Pope Francis should be required reading. In its breadth, analysis and humanity, it is in the best tradition of Time Magazine, an institution that is ninety years old this year.  

Those who want the inside story of what the new Time Inc. might look like, please see Allan Sloan’s piece (www.finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/05/revelations-time-inc-spinoff/). The SEC filing can be found at www.sec.gov/archives.

Time is indeed marching on.

Church, State, and the Pope’s Miter in Pieces

As a Catholic and a magazine editor, I’ve long between interested in and amused by the doctrine of Church and State, associated most notably with Time Inc.  By this doctrine, the chief editor and her reports were responsible for making sure editorial content was not contaminated by the devilish intentions of advertisers.  God forbid, no particular religion was invoked in the literal, dogmatic sense to support this doctrine, but one could almost feel the long arm of the Vatican at work here.  A chief editor was venerated and, if not infallible, was considered at least to be seated on the right side of history.

I just returned from a trip to Northern Italy, including Verona and Venice, and even though Rome is safely to the south, the Catholic Church is present in every nook and cranny, and fiercely marketed along the sinuous routes in Venice that force tourists along an ordained and righteous path from the train station at San Lucia to the famous St. Marks Square where the pilgrims gather.  Even if one is pulled in by the strains of the Latin mass or a lilting Vivaldi, it’s hard not to notice the stalls where the bric-a-brac, including the purported bones of saints, are offered by sale with the utmost reverence. I immediately assumed the apocryphal.  When Pope Francis recently presented nine bones of St. Peter to his audience in Rome, I thought that whatever the theology or science at work here, this would be definitely good for business in Venice.

At these stalls one can find almost anything, framed pieces of cloth that belonged to someone holy or framed pieces of a miter or a Pope’s hat worn by some famous bishop.  You can imagine my sense of wonder, serendipity, and, yes, synchronicity to return home and discover that the outgoing Time Inc. editor-in-chief Martha Nelson had cut-up and framed pieces of a miter kept in her office to symbolize editorial independence and distributed this going-away gift to her direct reports, both digital and print.  She acknowledged that although these fragments of the miter were distributed in jest, they served as a reminder that every editor is responsible for maintaining editorial integrity.

Like Ms. Nelson’s gesture, my remarks are in jest and I suspect that Pope Francis, who has given up many of the trappings of office, including living in a luxurious Vatican apartment, might be amused by the symbolic miter cut, framed and returned to the community.  His Holiness would likely have little to say about Time Inc.’s push into native advertising.

With the return of Norman Pearlstine, once editor-in-chief, to Time Inc. in the new position of Chief Content Officer, we can perhaps expect to see a new generation of editors who won’t violate their oath by learning to be good marketers.  As someone who has played in that sandbox, I think editors at Time Inc. in particular have too often been considered a breed apart, a keeper of the faith, and protectors of the miter when they should have been paying more attention to the marketplace. 

Goodness knows the industry needs a strong and sustainable Time Inc., especially with the content business changing rapidly, and publishers are faced with new types of advertising variously called native advertising, content marketing, and sponsored content.  Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and others are already experimenting with these new advertising formats, demonstrating that on this matter the horse has already left the barn. And it is not just media companies looking at the revenue and branding opportunities.  Consumer brands such Dell, Xerox, GE, Unilever, Coca Cola and dozens of others are now squarely in the content business shaping and telling their own brand stories.  For publishers it is not only the realization that print revenues will continue to decline and digital will not make-up the short-fall.  It is a realization that the basic advertising model has forever changed and media companies will have to adjust accordingly.  Competitors are coming from every quarter, including current advertisers.

I am currently involved in building a platform that links content, cause marketing, and corporate brands fully integrated with social media.  I have been genuinely surprised at the extent brands use content to enrich their story-telling and increase consumer engagement.

I enjoy the parlor game about whether Twitter and Facebook are media companies (they are and become more so every day) but that is so yesterday, coming from the Church/State days.  Advertising agencies, corporate brands, and every online aggregator from Buzzfeed to Mashable all are or will become media companies.

Since the AOL disaster, Time Inc. has been savaged for its digital policy, management incompetence and a host of other sins. But too little has been said about what Time Inc. has contributed to the industry; from its generous support of MPA, to underwriting at its own expense technical specifications that have been widely adopted, to sharing its consumer research, I know of no better corporate citizen in the media ranks. In my seven years at MPA, the magazine media association, Time Inc. staff always gave generously of their time for workshops, committees, and my education.

The industry should welcome the new Time Inc., due to be spun off in 2014, into the content discussion where the geography seems to shift by the day.  It’s a jungle out there.

We can use the help. 

Searching for Venus/Aphrodite

I just returned from a visit to Northern Italy with my family.  We spent most of our time in Verona, the home of a childhood friend and his Italian wife.  I had visited cities along the rhumb line from Milan to Venice over the years when I was editor of Bicycling magazine, primarily to meet with frame-makers such as Colnago, Cinnelli, and De Rosa, as well as components manufacturer Campagnola.  I liked the story line: small custom Italian framemakers, the last of the artisans, were holding out against the generic and undifferentiated product line from Asia.  From what I could tell from observing hundreds of bikes around Lake Garda in the pre-Alps, the Italian bike industry is doing just fine.  Much as the cyclists annoyed drivers on the narrow roads around the lake, there was something aesthetically pleasing about this scene, but no more than observing smart women in Verona commuting to work by bike.  Beauty is afoot.  Venus must be close.

On our return to New York, I read that Pope Francis might be considering choosing a woman as one of the next cardinals.  The Holy See Press was quick to squash this rumor, adding that a woman cardinal was “theoretically possible.”  Pope Francis, in his remarks about women, nuns, and the Church’s preoccupation with sexual issues, has made it clear that he understands the importance of bringing the feminine principle into the Church for theological and psychological reasons.  The hierarchy is old, white and crusty and in need of Aphrodite’s influence.  And she’s closer than the vicars think.

In Italy, we made our pilgrimage to Venice and shouldered our way through the narrow streets, competing with the thousands of tourists offloaded from at least five cruise ships.  Venice is a bazaar, and the route from the St. Lucia train station to the famous St. Mark’s Square was past the inevitable barkers selling enough trinkets to sink this delicate city.  But this city is also alleys and canals and surprises, such as strains of Verdi’s La Traviata coming from the Opera House, the understated and beautiful St. Paul’s, a 9^th century Russian orthodox church, and the masked parishioners appearing out of nowhere on their way to celebrate their version of the Day of the Dead, which is beginning to look a lot like Halloween.

As much as possible—and guided by our knowledgeable Italian friends, we stayed away from the popular tourist watering holes, though we couldn’t help returning a few times to the bronze statue of Juliet underneath the requisite balcony that was without Romeo and lacked any particular historical license.  But that didn’t matter.  What began as a nod to Shakespeare’s play and an attempt to attract a few more tourists’ euros, this statue has become a shrine for lovers from around the world.  Social media is populated with “selfies” of young men and women, posing with Juliet, and, as if on demand, rubbing her right breast with such passion and tenacity that the poor thing will require augmentation in the need future.

At the entrance to this shrine the walls are covered with thousands of signatures, hearts, and statements of youthful undying love.  The authorities made this space available to discourage tourists from attaching messages to the walls with chewing gum.  Now that the tourists have run out of wall, they are attaching small locks available at a store nearby to a metal wall board.  The locks carry hearts and names of lovers.  My Italian friend said the “love lock” craze started after the publication of a novel Three Meters above the Sky, where this activity suggested undying and unbreakable love.  During the last decade, love padlocks have been attached to bridges in Florence, Dublin, Cairo and dozens of other cities where they are increasingly seen as emblems of vandalism rather than lasting love.  Perhaps so, but we probably need to recognize Aphrodite in whatever form she chooses to appear in.

After a day of visiting a half a dozen churches in and around Verona, my friend asked me my impression.  I said it was as if a “pandemonium of images” visited me.  I didn’t mean that as an exaggeration.  Verona has some of the most beautiful and oldest churches in Italy.  These include: Basilica De S. Zeno, Duomo, Basilica de S. Anastasia, and the Chiesa de S. Fermo.   The Renaissance churches are active and alive, with services generally trumping the needs of tourists.  But this is Italy and the churches can’t help themselves.  The paintings and the frescoes offer startling imagery above the melancholy devotional chants. The statue of Jesus in the Duomo seems voluptuous; the figure almost seems pregnant.  The saints are showing a little too much leg.  The cherubs are just too cute.

I write these words as a Catholic, a student of religious culture, and an academic with a PhD dissertation on “Aesthetics and the Religious Mind in Three Catholic Novelists: Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor.”  My first book of poems was That Kingdom Coming Business, about religion’s role in war.  I explored this more deeply in The Archetype of the Gun, a Kindle e-book, about the religious, mythological, and psychological underpinnings of the gun debate.  So I’ve wrestled with these issues for a long time.

In Italy, I was reminded of the centrality of the image and that beauty cannot be outlawed by edict or canon.  I am indebted to the late psychologist James Hillman and his exploration of this theme in ReVisioning Psychology, one of the most important books of this genre in the last fifty years and grounded in the Italian Renaissance.  Hillman reminds us that in the middle of the sixteenth century, as a response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church “removed substance and virtue from all holy images.”  Also banished were the myths, the demons, and the Gods from Olympus.  Hillman notes that “Personifying was driven out of churches and into the madhouse.”

But not completely in Italy where, due to cultural forces still shaped by the Renaissance, the sacred and the profane can still rest comfortably alongside one another. Hillman goes back to Marsilio Ficino, “a loveless, humpbacked, melancholy teacher” from Florence for his text because it was Ficino who wrote that soul-making, rather than being the exclusive province of the religious, was central to our imaginings, creative life and culture.  Hillman takes this a little further.  In ReVisioning Psychology, he defines soul as: that unknown component that makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.  “By ‘soul’ I mean the imaginative possibilities in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy—that mode that recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”  

In September 2007, James Hillman gave an address on the island of Capri, Italy, in Italian entitled “Aphrodite’s Justice,” a plea to invite Aphrodite into psychology; more beauty and less of the theoretical.  In his invocation to Aphrodite (Greek) and Venus (Latin), Hillman reminds the Goddess of “Those who follow your train and traffic with your gifts—poets, lovers, musicians, craft persons and colorists of many tastes, and those who would make each moment in their day show a sign of Venus in manner, odor, décor, dress and speech, those who bring charm, sensuality, lightness of touch, frivolity even, and the madness of passion—have for too long been relegated in our civilization to a lesser, trivial place, neither serious nor moral.”

It is not surprising that Hillman, beloved in Italy, gave this presentation there.  The sensuousness he describes is part of the fabric of Italian life, often found in the small and the obscure.  Outside the medieval church, Pieve di San Giorgio, north of Verona, were located a stack of granite boulders from a Roman ruins—ancient Rome asserts itself everywhere in the region.  Tucked in the side of this construction was a black, somewhat abstract rendition of the Madonna and Child about the size of man’s hand.  It was not under lock-and-key; it wasn’t secured in any way.  Just there, as it were, in hiding in plain view.

The Lady is everywhere.