Novak's House is Made of Glass (and so is mine)

Rick is more familiar with First Things than I am.  I just want to clarify, though, that a persistent call to sacrifice in order to alleviate some of the suffering of the poor is not, in my mind, the same as a periodic stick in the eye of those who want to use the government to help the poor.  I may be wrong, but First Things seems to do plenty of the latter, not so much of the former.  Take, for example, this piece from the current issue titled What Should We Do About the Poor? ("Because the reality of the underclass has to do mainly with culture and patterns of personal behavior, what government can do to help is limited.")  I do not believe that every journal has to focus on every issue implicated by CST, but I think we let ourselves off much too easily in terms of what the Gospel calls us to do. 

I've been reading much of what's been produced by Yale law prof Dan Kahan's "Cultural Cognition" project, which studies our tendency to view disputed matters of fact through the lenses of our cultural identities, so that "where members of society disagree about the harmfulness of a particular form of conduct, we instinctively trust those who share our vales -- and whose judgments are likely to be biased in a particular direction by emotion, dissonance avoidance, and related mechanisms."  (This comes from Kahan's wonderful paper, The Cognitively Illiberal State.)  We don't like to be pushed out of our comfort zone, particularly when it comes to complicated policy issues, and so we tend to cluster around shared sets of beliefs that are shaped by factors beyond the "merits" of the issue at hand.  Our parish, in a politically progressive neighborhood, talks a lot more about poverty than about abortion.  I know of parishes in politically conservative neighborhoods that talk a lot more about abortion than about poverty.  I suspect that Democrats are more comfortable than Republicans reading Commonweal, and I suspect the opposite is true for First Things.  If we think that our level of attraction to each magazine is purely a function of our good-faith, free-standing reading of the Catholic intellectual tradition, we're kidding ourselves.  CST is broad enough that it can provide cover for directions in which we were already headed, and our magazines reflect that.