The Caelum Et Terra Homepage

Site News! January 3, 2005

If there’s an article you’ve been wanting to see, click here to email your request to Maclin Horton and he’ll put it in the queue; likewise if you were a contributor or friend of the magazine and would like a notice of your current activities, publications, web site, whatever, posted here.

This is a web site made up by admirers of the late journal, Caelum Et Terra, which was published from 1991-1996 by a small group of insightful and counter-cultural Catholics. Edited by Dan Nichols, the publication began with Maclin and Karen Horton serving as assistant editor and technical editor, and by the closing issue, editorial assistants included Joseph and Tracy Almeida, Judy Bratten, and Regina Doman, Christopher Ryland as Production Editor, Michelle Ulrich as editorial assistant, and contributing editors were Eric Brende, Fr. Herald Brock, CFR, Maclin Horton, Nancy Kummerlein, Br. Fidelis Moscinski, CFR, Lesley Payne, Thomas Storck, and Juli Loesch Wiley. These people came from a wide range of backgrounds and experience, and included organic farmers, artists, homeschooling mothers, human rights activists, professors, computer professionals, Luddites, friars working in the inner city, and families living in the backwoods. The writers and subscribers were of a similar wide variety – united strongly by their Catholic faith and loosely by their profound questions about the culture most Catholics accept and live in.

Nichols and the Hortons wrote in the editorial of the flagship issue, “Though we are interested in offering a critique of the contemporary world, our greatest emphasis will be on building the new culture here and now in whatever small ways we can… we are particularly interested in exploring possible affinities between disparate voices (Catholic Worker radicals, traditionalist conservatives, Greens) which, consciously or not, affirm Catholic social principles. As should be obvious, all of this leaves considerable room for debate, which we hope to encourage.”

The journal was hard to classify, and perhaps this classification was part of its eventual demise. While its subscribers were loyal, they were small in number. With his marriage to Michelle Ulrich in 1996, Nichols had less time to devote to the journal, and in the end, the magazine ceased publication.

However, it had created a group of Catholics self-identified as “Caelum Et Terra” types, who continue the dialogue begun by the editors of the journal. This dialogue goes on in the list created by Catholic Worker Robert Waldrop and in occasional newsletters edited by Christopher Zehnder and David Alexander. As most of the discussion goes on these days by word of mouth, we feel it appropriate to title it “The Conversation.”