The first issue of The Lamp contained an essay by J. D. Vance, the author of a bestselling memoir, who had recently been received into the Catholic Church. Five years later, the administration in which Mr. Vance serves as vice president issued an executive order meant “to ensure reliable access to I.V.F. treatment, including by easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make I.V.F. treatment drastically more affordable.”

This turn of events is as good an illustration as any of the situation in which we find ourselves. The integral understanding of human nature is still threatened by “atomization, spoliation, rootlessness, and mindless entertainment,” as we put it our first issue. What Cardinal Sarah called the “dictatorship of noise” is growing louder—and more dictatorial. Never mind badly written books; writing itself is going the way of the verse drama while educationists extol the virtues of listening to audiobooks composed and read by robots at one and a half times speed.

I am tempted to say that if The Lamp did not exist, no one would have invented it. But that would be unfair to our readers, who from the very first have treated the magazine like a cross between an underground zine and the dive bar of their dreams. To all of you, I wish to extend my most sincere gratitude for your support, financial and otherwise. We started half a decade ago with twenty thousand dollars—less than what we now spend on a single issue—and have gone on to produce what I think is the best magazine in the English-speaking world. It is certainly the only one in which you have been able to read Giorgio Agamben, David Bradley, Charles Taylor, Minoo Dinshaw, Zena Hitz, Chris Arnade, as well as Sam Kriss’s dispatch from the Villages, Nic Rowan’s report on human composting, Stanley Fish’s litany of impossible things, Paul J. Griffiths’s brief against “human flourishing,” Peter Howarth’s appreciative essay on William Morris, new voices such as Aaron James on Logan Pearsall Smith and John Ladouceur on Peter Brown, to say nothing of Peter Brown himself on Saint Augustine. (My own favorite is Bishop Daniel Flores’ contribution to our symposium on Hell.)

Thanks is also due to the Institute for Human Ecology, which for much of The Lamp’s run has provided financial assistance and partnered with the magazine in hosting events at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. My conversations with students after these events—about everything from the evolution of Syriac lectionaries to Saint Jerome and unicorns—have been one of the most rewarding parts of my involvement with IHE.

As we prepared to send this issue to the printer, we learned of the death of Pope Francis, whose legacy will be the subject of a symposium in our next issue. Like most of our readers, I know very little about his successor, Leo XIV. The most intriguing thing I have read is his intervention at a synod during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. “When people hear the Christian message,” Cardinal Prevost said in 2012, “it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective.” I like to think that with every piece we publish we are trying to eliminate that inevitability. Either our failures to be the light of the world will come often without being inevitable; or, when failure is inevitable, as it occasionally must be, it is at least infrequent. “Evangelization in the modern world,” Leo tells us, “must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery.” Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.