December (Web-only) 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Occasionally in this space we've mentioned re:generation quarterly, which should be on your bedside table or bathroom rack or wherever you stack your magazines. I just received the Fall 2000 issue (Volume 6, No. 3), which reminds me yet again why RQ is indispensable. There are dozens of other magazines and journals clamoring for attention, not to mention the tottering piles of books (all new arrivals), but RQ immediately goes into the "read tonight!" bag.

Why? Partly because the magazine is unpredictable. The first piece I read in this issue was a delightful surprise: "How I Became a Campus Revolutionary," by Adam Kissel, a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Kissel, a self-described conservative, tells how he worked with an unlikely ally—a fellow grad student of the socialist persuasion—to resist a money-driven administrative master plan that would have trashed Chicago's distinctive educational philosophy. The essay is sharp and funny; better yet, the good guys win. And Adam Kissel is clearly a writer to watch.

RQ's editors seem to have scoured America for bright young men and women who have become disaffected with Protestantism, especially of the evangelical variety, and have found a spiritual home in Catholicism or Orthodoxy. If you are a regular reader of the magazine, you've seen stories recounting such conversions. But in this issue, Albert Louis Zambone's essay, "What, Me Convert?" takes a different direction. Zambone, a Ph.D. candidate in medieval history at the Roman Catholic University of America and junior dean of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Oxford, England, tells how an enthusiasm for things Catholic can lead Protestants to a deeper appreciation of the riches of their own traditions—in ...