Death of the StAR? – Catholic World Report

For the past quarter of a century, I’ve been honoured to edit the St. Austin Review, popularly known as the StAR, a Catholic cultural journal, published six times a year.

The StAR was launched in September 2001, the month of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. It appeared in the midst of that darkest of months as a beacon of light, shining forth the goodness, truth, and beauty of God’s presence in a gloom-laden and doom-darkened world.

I’ve been the editor of the StAR since the beginning and have been deeply invested in its mission, working without any payment for all these years because I believe that it shines forth the goodness of beauty and the splendour of truth. It’s been a long and lingering labour of love.

I am deeply grateful to our constellation of subscribers, without whom our StAR would have long since fallen. It is, therefore, with great sadness that I need to announce that our beloved StAR will cease to exist unless there is someone willing to partner with me in the mission to keep it in the ascendant.

For all these years, I’ve been a mendicant, begging cap-in-hand to keep the StAR shining. Since 2001, there have been no fewer than five different publishers, each of which has been unable to continue for one reason or another. Each time, as one publisher after another has left us, I’ve scrambled to find a new home for our wandering StAR.

This time, however, I need an individual person to partner with me because I am no longer willing to seek new short-term institutional partners.

We have a new issue ready to go. Its theme is “Shamrock, Thistle, Daffodil and Rose: The Cultures of the British Isles”. It’s another superb issue, filled to the brim with great theme-related articles, regular columns, book reviews, art and film features, and new poetry.

But it will never be published unless a good old-fashioned patron of the arts steps forward to become my partner. If there’s nobody out there willing to offer an ongoing subvention of $30,000 per year to help us move forward on a sure financial footing, I will take it as a sign that it’s time for our light to be extinguished.

This sum is effectively what I’ve donated in unpaid labour every year for twenty-four years. I will continue to donate my time if someone is willing to match my commitment with the needed funds. If I’m the only one who values the St. Austin Review to this degree, it seems that our StAR must be allowed to die.

If there is one person, one Godsend, who would like to step forward to be my partner, to be the other half of a dynamic duo determined to keep the StAR burning bright in a dark world, please write to me directly. My email address is joseph@jpearce.co. Your response is a matter of life and death for this small and beautiful journal. I’d be overjoyed to hear from you.

I’d like to conclude by reiterating my deepest gratitude to all those who have supported our mission through their subscriptions and contributions.

As for what I feel about those who have joined me in this crusade for goodness, truth, and beauty over the past twenty-four years, I am reminded of the words of Oscar Wilde. We are all in the gutter, said Wilde, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Adopting his words but adapting them, I would say that we are all in the gutter, but some of us have been looking at the StAR!