Editor’s Commentary

March was a month of pilgrimage for many, culminating in the celebration of Easter, to which we also participated with a wide selection of essays, reviews, and poems dealing with spiritual, pilgrim, and martyr themes. The month was also our best month ever for readership and viewers of the journal, as we eclipsed 50,000 readers for the first time in the journal’s history. This is a great accomplishment and continues to show our ability to grow and innovate in the digital world as we become a more well-known name in the publishing space.

April will mark the return of themed editions at VOEGELINVIEW. At the end of this month, a series of essays, book reviews, and poems dealing with Shakespeare will be published in our pages addressing “Shakespeare and the Good Life” and Shakespeare’s broader influence on intellectual culture and ideas. We very much look forward to sharing with you these writings on the great Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon.

As we continue to change and evolve into a preeminent online journal of commentary and criticism, we are looking to engage more fruitfully with daily news, events, and current affairs. Eric Voegelin, our namesake, was intimately involved with the crises of his times, from the rise of totalitarianism and Nazism in Europe to the struggle with international communism during the height of the Cold War. While the forces of liberty and democracy that gave Voegelin a home and refuge during those dark times emerged victorious, we find ourselves in a brave new world with new struggles of the soul calling the best of our hearts and minds to leadership and reflection. Having successfully become a hub for arts and literary criticism, poetry, and book reviews, our next task going forward is to become a space for serious commentary and opinion on daily events and foreign affairs. In the past, we have devoted time to such matters, like Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, the State of the Union in the United States, and Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel, but we are now looking to make this into a regular feature of the journal. The journal already has a substantial archive of academic elaborations on politics, political philosophy, and political theory, so now it is our task to be bring substantive and readable commentary and insight about the world of politics we find ourselves living in and navigating. Just as readers from around the world come to our pages for insightful and thoughtful reflections on art, books, and culture, readers will come to our pages for penetrating and thoughtful reflections on the state of the world, global events, and the issues facing—especially—American democracy and its constitutional order: concerns that were very much part of Voegelin’s considerations when he was alive and should be a concern for all of us in the Eric Voegelin Society, VOEGELINVIEW, and, frankly, the world.

Over the past couple of years, our endeavor to transform from a forum of niche academic discussion to being a leader in public discourse on art, culture, politics, poetry, and reviews has been achieved with great success and much hard work. It is with firm belief that this final transformation—the return of themed editions and more frequent publications on news and global events—will complete this transformation and transition into becoming a top tier online journal of commentary and criticism. In our landscape so devoid of the serious that remains accessible and readable, our mission to bring enlightenment and order to the soul remains as important as ever. It is with much hope that I look forward to what this next transformation will bring and what the rest of this year has to offer for all of us, reader and contributor alike, at VOEGELINVIEW.

~ Paul Krause

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