Several comments have been made concerning an article recently published that appeared in our Opinion-Commentary section entitled “The Roots of White Anxiety” (read it here: http://bit.ly/9KmPdr).

I have extracted those comments so readers can quickly understand the purpose of this editorial, which is to answer these questions:

A bit confused. written by Rae Whitlock, July 21, 2010
Wondering what this article has to do with the PCA and other reformed churches.

I second that Rae. Written by David Yoder, July 21, 2010
What does this article have to do with PCA, other reformed churches or the gospel?

In the ‘About Us’ link in the Masthead of The Aquila Report (we like to refer to it as TAR for an acronym) it says: “There will also be articles addressing issues of interest to the church”.

Perhaps that phrase needs working – it should probably say “….of interest to our readers” or perhaps “….of interest to people in the church.” At least, that’s the way I approach article selection. Let me explain how things get done at TAR and that might help.

Dominic Aquila is the Editor, I am the Publisher, but for now – since I am semi-retired (LOL) – I have more time to snoop for news and that is my role. Each day I probably look at 500-800 news links on Google and/or a set of about 50 source sites I visit. I have about 30 fixed Google searches set up and get email feeds from about half of them.

And, of course, sometimes people who know TAR send us stuff, and occasionally (and I wish I had more time to do this) we ask people to write stores. (I just sent an email to a missionary-Bible College teacher in South Africa who, along with his wife, is moving into a new ministry to do Marriage Enrichment Seminars and counseling and is struggling to figure out the best way to do that in their unusual cultural structure – that sounded like a story to me.)

From my usually daily search I find 6 or 7 articles I believe are worth publishing. In the afternoons I send the next day’s package to Dominic (our software is set up to publish new day stories at 12:01AM EDT – or 1:01AM EDST). He then reviews the package to pick out anything he believes is inappropriate or irrelevant. I know his tastes well enough now that when I think something might be ‘iffy’ I send it to him as soon as I find it and if he approves, I put it the whichever day’s package it might fit the best (you may have noticed that we put up different stuff on weekends than we do during the week).

Since Dominic has far less time available than I do to find news, he tends to focus on Op-Ed pieces and when he has one he sends it to me for posting (I do nearly all the posting – it works best for one person to do that to maintain some balance in the daily story mix). If I have questions or objections, we exchange emails. In the two years we’ve been doing this we have occasionally had disagreements and since he’s the editor and it’s his name on the masthead, I defer to his judgment.

In the article in question, it was one I came across and found interesting – at least to me. This is a very subjective business (as is all of journalism, and all writing for that matter) and, at the end of the day, readers are left with the subjective judgments of those who make the decisions as to what news and commentary is appropriate to publish.

Of course, there are media vehicles out there that report on what other media is doing and whether they like it or not – talk about subjective! And ultimately, if there are not enough readers who like the choices, the magazine goes out of business.

Anyway, and here I am speaking just for me, my view is that there is news and commentary out there that would be of interest to our reader demographic that is not about or from the demographic itself, but might be of interest to them. I also apply the same test to articles that are not specifically Gospel-oriented. That just describes what my personal world and life view is; again subjective. When I find stuff like that it goes either into the ‘World and Life News’ section of the Magazine, or if it is itself a Op-Ed piece, it goes here in the Opinion-Commentary section.

I have a strongly held belief (not to be confused with faith in the Word of God) that Christians in general, but Reformed Christians in particular, need to be well read on issues of the day outside the church. (I hate to use the term that has become pejorative in recent years, but I think “well read” should be ‘fair and balanced’; you know, examine both sides – guess that’s a carry over from my [ancient] days as a college debater!)

If we had more staff and could afford more bandwidth (is that the correct term? I’m not much of a technogeek) I would be in favor of expanding this portion of what we do.

This explains where the article in question came from; it does not yet answer the question of whether it was appropriate or not. We have a Board meeting scheduled for September 17 to set up a new business plan for TAR (more on that soon) and I will ensure this discussion gets on the agenda. If nothing else, it will probably result in having an ‘Editorial Committee’ established from among those people who will be invited to serve on a new Advisory Board that we want to set up in the near future.

Don K. Clements, Publisher
The Aquila Report
(I guess that makes me the TARP!)

P. S. One of the comments above came from Rae Whitlock, a Ruling Elder in a PCA church in Ohio. Rae will be introduced to our readers on Monday morning when one of his blog articles will be published. We hope to see more of his writing in the future – so I sure hope this answer is helpful to him (although that’s NOT the motivation for writing the editorial, just a coincidence).