June, 2002
Each year for the last twenty years, a number of us, former U.S. Jesuits
(mainly from the California and Oregon Provinces), have met to renew our
connections and at the same time consider how we might advance the concern for
goodness and justice that had been a major emphasis in our training.
We called ourselves Compañeros/Companions, after the quasi-military
Spanish phrase Ignatius Loyola used for his Company of Jesus, and incorporated
as a religious 501(c)(3) organization under the name West Coast
Compañeros Inc (WCCI).
At the Companions' annual reunion (held in Santa Barbara this year at the
beginning of February), our board resolved to produce a monthly journal of
religion and culture, Just Good Company. We hope to involve other
former Jesuits in this adventure and, indeed, any one who shares our interest
in promoting a dialogue with the world we live in. Cardinal John Henry Newman
once wrote about the ideal university as “a place where great
conversations happen.” In Just Good Company, we will
promote great conversations. Nothing is more fun than a great conversation. If
this kind of fun appeals to you, please read on. And then please pass this on
to the most interesting and exciting people you know. We will need you all as
eventual readers and contributors.
The following Q. and A. pretty much explains what we want to do and how
we propose to do it.
Q. Will this be a Catholic magazine?
A. We’d like to
produce a magazine that will be more catholic than Catholic. It will certainly
not be a journal of advocacy for the hierarchical Church. Rather this: an
intelligent forum that will draw the attention of thoughtful people everywhere,
and appeal, ultimately, to all men and women of good will.
Q. Will this be a Jesuit magazine?
A. The publishers and editors
are former Jesuits. Many of us are still Jesuits at heart, trying to make a
difference in the world. To begin with, we intend to promote Just Good
Company through an international network of former Jesuits, Jesuits,
and the many millions of Jesuit alumni around the world. That will be a pretty
good start.
Q. Still Jesuits at heart? What does that mean?
A.
Worldwide, there are now more ex-Jesuits than Jesuits. Many of us still live
our lives trying to answer the challenge and the charge of Ignatius Loyola.
While he was still a layman, he ended his renowned Spiritual Exercises with an
invitation, that we try to see God in all things and all things in God, as we
go about our work in the world.
Q. Where does Jesus fit into this vision?
A. We make our
own his mission statement, that he had come so we may have life and have it
more abundantly. In our Novitiate days, we were told that this "life" was the
"supernatural life of sanctifying grace." Now, we will put a less pious and
more secular spin on Jesus’ words, but we will be borrowing the spin from
St. Ignatius himself, who invited us to see ourselves as principal players in a
world that was basically good ñ good, because it was redeemed by Christ. It was
a call for us to get involved in the world ñ in its art, its science, its
literature, its music, its drama, its economy, its sports, even that sport
called politics. When we do this, we are having life, and having it more
abundantly. This is the tone we would like to strike in Just Good
Company, that the world is charged with the grandeur of God, and if you
want to know how it is so charged, you can read all about it in Just Good
Company.
Q. Isn’t this going to be an expensive proposition?
A. The unique thing about Just Good Company is this:
we won’t have to rent offices, we won’t have any print or paper
bills, and no budget for postage. The magazine will exist only in cyberspace.
We will use the technology of the World Wide Web to provide a free forum for
all men and women of good will who are able to join us in our updated pursuit
of an old goal: God's glory.
Q. God’s glory? Doesn’t God already have all the glory She
needs?
A. Like many old notions, this one needs updating for the
21st century. Surprisingly enough, we find a fourth-century figure, St.
Irenaeus, giving us a formulation that works today: “God’s glory is
humanity fully alive.” And so, with Just Good Company,
we’d like to appeal to men and women of every faith tradition (and of no
particular faith tradition) who might be heading in that same direction,
whether they have ever formulated the goal in these particular words or not ñ
helping humanity come fully alive.
Q. How will you do that?
A. Logically enough, on a planet
where people cannot come fully alive because the world they live in is so
notably lacking in peace and justice, we’d like to focus, among other
things, on peace and justice issues. We hope Just Good Company
can, therefore, be a prophetic voice in the world, along the lines of the
Brazilian Paulo Freire's notion of the educator-as-prophet, who, according to
Freire, denounces “what stinks to high heaven, and announces the good
news.” The good news is this: that we have been empowered, as Jesus the
prophet said, “to have life and have it more abundantly.”
Q. Prophecy? Prophets? Sounds pretty grand, pretty self-important.
A. The fact is that the prophets of the Old Testament were all very
ordinary, un-prepossessing men who made an impact on their world not by reason
of their status or their power, or even by their intelligence or their tricky
rhetoric, but by reason of this, that they were not afraid to speak the simple
and rather obvious truths that were staring them in the face. (The famous
Little Boy who observed that the passing King wore no clothes was, in this
sense, a prophet.)
Q. Why the name Just Good Company?
A.
“Company” conjures up the original Spanish name for the Society of
Jesus, the Compañia de Jesús, but there is already a fine U.S.
Jesuit magazine called COMPANY. And so, in a brain-storming session, we added
the word “Good,” because we felt that our readers would enjoy being
“in good company.” But then we found we couldn't use GOOD COMPANY
on the Web, because it was already taken in all of its .com, .org, .net
extensions -- by escort services! Then one of our members, thinking of Vatican
II’s hi-priority emphasis on "faith doing justice," came up with the
added word JUST, the adjectival form of "justice."
Q. But doesn’t Just Good Company also have a
self-deprecating ring to it?
A. Well, Just Good
Company is a megalomaniacal idea, so we probably need a dash of
modesty.
Q. Megalomania?
A. We have high hopes. We hope we can,
eventually, bring in 100,000 to a million readers from around the world, partly
because Just Good Company will be free, partly because the word
will soon get around that this is an independent catholic magazine that speaks
the truth about religion and the culture that surrounds us.
Q. How can a magazine be both Catholic and independent? Isn’t that
an oxymoron?
A. Notice that we are spelling catholic with a
small c. It will be a subtle reminder that we enjoy no official status, not in
the Church, not among the Jesuits, and, frankly, we do not want an official
status. That would restrict our freedom to produce a monthly forum of ideas for
anyone and everyone determined to have life and have it more abundantly.
Just Good Company will provide a forum for those who do not
believe in Catholic-art, or Catholic-science, or Catholic-literature. The
worlds of art, of science, of literature – of journalism itself –
have their own intrinsic rules of excellence. We do not believe in hyphenated
learning.
Q. Are there any other Catholic magazines like yours?
A.
Just Good Company will strive for an independence that few if any
Catholic magazines have ever had. Lord Acton tried to start such a magazine in
England about 140 years ago, if memory serves correctly, and he folded it under
pressure from the English hierarchy. This is the same Acton who wrote that
"power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." By producing a
magazine that is both independent and catholic, we hope to signalize a new era
in the history of the Church, where apologists often assert "the Church has
nothing to fear from the truth," while Churchmen often do their darndest to
suppress it. The freedom of the Internet itself has already helped to promote
greater freedom of expression – everywhere.
Q. A good many Catholic journals are limping along; they lament the fact
that their old subscribers are dead or dying, and that younger folks are simply
not subscribing like their parents did. Does the world need another Catholic
magazine?
A. This is one reason why we are going on the Web. We
don’t need a big budget to make our presence felt there. Furthermore,
it’s a place where everyone gathers, young, middle-aged, and older folks.
(In the U.S., half the population now has email. In a few years, email will be
as ubiquitous as the telephone.) There are no gatekeepers in cyberspace, to
stop us from speaking the truth to power, or deny us access to everyone between
Nome and Tierra del Fuego. We want to reach the whole world. The Web seems to
be a new kind of launch pad we can use to make that outreach.
Q. When will we see your first issue?
A. Sometime around
Thanksgiving. We are actually planning three issues right now. But we
won’t go public with the first one until we have the right mix of
features, and the right design. We want a cyberspace magazine that is easy to
download and easy to read, and we are in the process of finding the right
professionals who can help us do that.
Q. Who will write for you?
A. We already have a network of
writers in the wings, many of them coming from a Jesuit background, but we want
to let others know we have an open forum that will welcome different points of
view on how they would help make humanity come alive. If you’ve received
this message, you qualify to send us the names and email addresses of great
writers, known and unknown, especially writers with burning ideas who are
looking for an audience they can set on fire. Then we can have a kind of
prophecy-site, in the Old Testament sense of the word prophecy. We know a few
atheists and agnostics, the kind of guys and gals Pope John XXIII would have
embraced because they are, ummm, good people who are trying to make a
difference in the world. We would like to bring them into our good company...
and have them write for us, and help us connect with their worlds, where, we
know, other good people gather. Anyone can write prophetically: Moslems,
Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, even atheists and Jesuits. And ex-Jesuits.
Q. How will people know what kind of articles you want?
A.
They can tell, simply by reading our first issues. We have another wrinkle:
Most publications are pretty hush-hush about their plans for upcoming big
stories. We will take the opposite approach, letting our readers know the
subjects we plan to address in the months ahead, and inviting their
suggestions, perspectives, and contributions. That would pre-build some
interest, give our readers some sense of ownership, and help us discover new
authors. For example, we’d like to devote a whole, early issue of
Just Good Company to “The Future of the Jesuits.” So
come at us with your thoughts on this subject.
Send them to:
JustGoodCompany-submissions@yahoogroups.com.
By the way, submissions
should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, and should be delivered as Microsoft
Word attachments.
Q. Will you print fiction?
A. Why not? Few magazines do
so, today, because they can’t afford the space. On the Web, we
don’t have space limitations. So we can publish not only short stories,
but even novels – probably in serial form, as Charles Dickens used to
do. We will also publish poetry. We have already hired a Poetry Editor. He is
Donald Junkins, a polymath professor of English (retired) from the University
of Massachusetts, whose poetry has been published in The New Yorker. He has had
nine books of his own poetry published. He is a world-wide lecturer on Ernest
Hemingway. (He was also an All-New England defensive back in the 1950s, and an
advance man for the 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy.)
Q. Will you have an editorial board?
A. We are now in the
process of recruiting an editorial board of men and women who can scout new
writing talent, and help keep us faithful to our mission, a board that will
help us think ecumenically, help us break down old and we hope outmoded
barriers between men and women of different religions, and of no religion. If
you’ve received this message, consider yourself present at a new
creation. Your reward: you get to send us your nominations for our independent
board. For anything other than submissions our business address is
JustGoodCompany@yahoogroups.com
Q. How will you handle controversial issues?
A. When we
deal with issues that need airing, we intend to be even-handed. There’s
an awful lot of certainty in the world, maybe too damn much. We can use a dose
of healthy skepticism. So, ideally, where there are two or more valid positions
on a given subject, we’d like to commission pieces from advocates for
each of those positions, and run them in the same issue. That will help make
Just Good Company "a place where great conversations happen."
Q. The Web has millions of sites. How do you propose to get noticed?
A. Good question. In fact, it is our key question. One of our
friends, Alex Auerbach, a former business editor for The Los Angeles Times,
puts it this way:
The major stumbling block of most Websites is
they are too damn easy to create. Imagine if anyone could easily create a
full-color magazine. How many of the resulting publications would be a Time or
Esquire? What attracts readers, and keeps them coming back, is a richness of
content, attractively presented and relevant to their interests. Even then,
they have to be hammered on the head fairly regularly to remind them that it's
there for them to read. Print magazines accomplish the latter by arriving in
your mailbox. Online publications don't have that luxury. Finding, attracting
and retaining an audience is an enormous challenge, regardless of whether the
'zine is for profit or for God.
We have an initial advantage. We start with a special community of interest,
an international network of ex-Jesuits, Jesuits and millions of Jesuit alumni.
If at the very beginning we can produce something intellectually exciting for
them, something they cannot find anywhere else, we will have made a good
start.
After that, we have to find ways of getting the word out to a wider
audience. We have some preliminary ideas on how to do that, and we are also
open to your suggestions. We think we can make co-op arrangements with the
owners of other websites, like America magazine, for instance, and the prayer
site of the Irish Jesuits, Sacred Space, at http://www.jesuit.ie/prayer/ which gets more than 6,000
hits a day. America magazine can send its readers to Just Good
Company. We can send our readers to America, or to Sacred Space through
what are known as “hyperlinks.” And so on, with a myriad of other
Catholic and Christian sites that are out there in cyberspace. Networking is
the key here, something that is done especially well on the Internet. (We hear
that religion sites also do well online; they are now surpassing sites that
feature pornography.) We will also seek to make a splash in the public prints,
hoping that our stuff will start a buzz going among Catholics, among
Christians, among anyone interested in religion and culture.
Q. Will you have a Spanish Edition?
A. We are giving this
serious consideration. To do that, we’d need an infusion of some dollars,
or pesos, or whatever, principally to pay translators whose native language is
Spanish. Any volunteers out there? But this raises another, more radical
question: if we have a Spanish edition, we should have a certain number of
articles written out of Latin America and Spain. Then we would have a truly
international magazine, not merely an Anglo-American magazine translated into
Spanish. We have a feeling that, if this is supposed to happen, a Spanish
edition will evolve.
Q. How will you know when Just Good Company is a
success?
A. We aren’t looking for commercial success. We
will be pleased if we can, over the next two years, attract 100,000 regular
readers across a wide ecumenical and inter-faith spectrum. We have technology
at hand that can tell us how many folks visit our site, and how many keep
returning. This technology can even tell us how many people read each article
– which is something that the best newspapers and magazines in the world
cannot do. We will have other indications to measure our success. For example,
letters to the editor, of which we plan to print a good many.
Q. Will you print every letter that comes in?
A. No. We
have high standards, and we would like to think that getting a letter printed
in Just Good Company will be something of a literary coup, a
privilege, not a right. When our Letters Editor regards a letter, he or she
will put a premium on clarity, verve, zest and iconoclastic wit more than
perfect grammar. If letter writers don’t got good grammar, but do have
good ideas, we can fix their grammar.
Q. How much will a subscription cost?
A. Nothing. The
folks who inhabit cyberspace are used to getting their information free; paid
online magazines usually need a subsidy to sustain them. (Slate has a
Bill Gates. A confession: we’d like to find a Bill Gates.) And collecting
money would not only bore us, it wouldn’t be worth our time and
effort.
Q. But you will have subscriptions?
A. Yes.
Q. So, what good is a subscription?
A. With a
subscription, we will notify you by email that a new issue has hit cyberspace.
The notice will include an overview of the month’s top features, and a
link to our web address http://JustGoodCompany.com.
Click there and you’ll be in Just Good Company.
Q. Can people visit who are not subscribers?
A. Yes. We
will have no gatekeepers, no passwords. People who hear of it, can just go
there and browse, copy and download an article, and, if they give us and the
author credit, pass it on to their friends. We would hope that if they like
what they see, they will keep coming back to re-join the conversation
represented in Just Good Company.
Q. But you will need some funding?
A. Yes. We will need
some funding to edit and deliver Just Good Company. But we
don’t need enormous funding, perhaps no more than $10,000 a month,
$120,000 for an entire year. This will pay our techies, our server-charges, our
editors and our contributors. This is an absurdly low outlay, compared to
magazines in print, which cost millions to mount, and often go belly up for
lack of advertising support.
Q. Where will you get your funding?
A. We hope to get
contributions from individuals, from corporations and from foundations that
have some sympathy for what we are doing.
Q. Will Just Good Company carry advertising?
A. This is a bit premature, but, when we have won a large number of
regular readers, we can carry ads from businesses that would like to reach our
special audience. We suspect these potential advertisers would likely be book
publishers. We could also earn income by directing our readers to booksellers
on the Internet who would give us (small) sales commissions. There may be other
sources of income that we are overlooking right now. Please let us know what we
are forgetting. (If we should be fortunate enough to make “a
profit,” the WCCI has a number of apostolic works that can use the money,
and we will not be shy telling our readers about those works.)
Q. What else does WCCI do?
A. WCCI already has an
association with the Jesuits’ California and Oregon Provinces in a number
of their works, some led by the Jesuits, some led by us. Our Robert Holstein,
for example, has spearheaded a movement to involve students and faculty from
all of the Jesuit colleges and universities in the U.S. (and others with no
special Jesuit affiliation) in an annual public protest against the U.S.
Army’s murderous School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
Holstein’s Ignatian Family Teach-In, is tied to U.S. Jesuit universities
and secondary schools, but not in a legal sense. The impetus and the organizing
comes from WCCI and Holstein. Other members of WCCI are running or contributing
to social outreach and literary programs in Mexico, Haiti and in Central
America. For further information, visit
http://westcoastcompanions.org.
Q. What can we do right now?
A. If you received this
email, you are among our special, founding friends. You can suggest story
ideas, books to review, submit that story you’d been saving for a rainy
day or:
You can help us raise some money in a number of ways:
1. Make out a check to WCCI (with the notation, Just Good Company) in U.S.
dollars or Euros or yen – or whatever, and send it to:
WCCI
702 Cree Drive
San Jose, CA 95123-4614
USA.
2. Help us raise start up funds, by sending email to people you know who
have the ability to help us, and ask them to make out their checks to WCCI
(with the notation, Just Good Company) and send them to:
WCCI
702 Cree Drive
San Jose, CA 95123-4614
U.S.A.
3. Or, give us the names and (preferably e-mail) addresses of people you
know who might be intrigued enough to give us some financial support for this
experiment.
You can tell them that WCCI is a 501c(3) organization, which means that
their contributions are tax-deductible. Our treasurer, David Van Etten, will
send them an acknowledgement that they can show their tax preparers and/or the
IRS.
Robert Blair Kaiser, editor
You can email us with questions, comments and suggestions at JustGoodCompany@yahoogroups.com.
We hope you do, to tell us what
you think.