The Distributist Review is a quarterly journal where Distributists can get into intelligent detail on the practice and theory of Distributism, without having to perpetually explain and defend the basics. In short, we can get to work!

Of course, if any Capitalists (or Socialists, or Whoever) want to have an intelligent, gracious debate in our pages, they're always welcome. But I'm mainly interested in applying Distributist thought to today's issues.

It's been several decades since the full flowering of the Distributist writers; that's several decades of new problems, and ever more data on the old problems. Chesterton critiqued the Big Shops with wit and candor; today there are groups (who've never heard of Distributism) who are patiently collecting data on precisely how much government money Wal-Mart pockets, and exactly how horrendous their supplier factories are. Though some people today are strangely resistant to common sense, there frequently remains a chink through which facts can penetrate.

Not that I envision this Review as aimed primarily at "evangelization." Rather, let's have a place where Distributists can get together and clarify our thought, in order to be "ready to render an account."

My sense is that we Distributists are often very proud of our heritage, but don't feel there are that many live Distributists. I think there are plenty of us, and we need a real journal so we can hear each other out in a "comfortable" setting. (It's quite exciting that Rich Aleman is beginning an annual Distributist Conference at this very same time.)

There's a sense of Distributism being stuck in the past, but it's a vicious circle: sure, we keep repeating Chesterton, but for the same reason you don't teach long division in kindergarten. As long as we're thinking primarily of evangelization, we'll have to keep rehashing the basics. Yet, many people are too "sophisticated" to pay attention to basics, so we have to ignore them for the moment, and get on with the more detailed work, the work of today. As we go, who knows, some pleasing convergence of data we toss off might be just the trick.

Don Goodman compares Chesterton, Belloc, et al. to the Fathers of the Church--they cleared the way, now we have to carry on with the work of Aquinas.

I'm also excited about engaging and discussing the many movements out there that have Distributist elements, e.g., New Urbanism, Permaculture, local currencies, not to mention new technologies like, well, the Internet and print-on-demand. Another major change from Chesterton's day; he had direct contact with the remnants of the sane culture. As far as I can tell, we've pretty much lost that in America, but on the other hand we have many splintered groups who sense what we've lost and are fighting for pieces of it. Yet they rarely, if ever, do the work of discovering a serious metaphysics to underly their actions. Also, they tend to view Christians, especially the Catholic Church, with benign suspicion at best. Depending on who they're looking at, we can't blame them. But if we start talking about them, and with them, who knows what might happen?

Bill Powell
2008 March