What happened was I heard about Geez magazine from the parish. Working in the print media industry myself, I know what an audacious venture a magazine is, and how difficult it is to keep one running. So with a cursory glance at the preview pages available on the website I ordered a subscription. Not realizing, bizarrely, that the magazine is based out of my own home town! How terrifically unexpected!

Knowing Winnipeg as I do, I said to myself, “Hm, a progressive Christian magazine. Fifty theoretical bucks (because Christians don’t gamble) says it’s run by MENNONITES.” And it is. Noting the return address on the envelope, I saw that Geez is based not only out of Winnipeg’s Granola Belt, but out of one of the hippiest streets in the Granola Belt! (Home Street, that is, though I know some might make the case for Ethelbert or Evanson Streets).

Let me preface this whole thing by saying that I dig Mennonites. I want to marry a Mennonite, a goal which, in my part of the world, where every second person is a Friesen or Thiessen or Dyck or Funk, would be seemingly easy except for the fact that so many Mennonite boys are baseball-cap-wearing conservatives and so many of the girls are straight. (Mennonites come in many different flavours, though, religious and non-, straight and gay, so I hold out hope).

I myself am only a few villages in Russia away from being Mennonite myself and am forever disappointed that I can’t quite claim that cultural heritage for my own, though I did grow up German Baptist which is really close.

Now, the Mennonites are just as effed up as any other denomination/sect, but what makes me hold admiration for them which I do not for other groups is the social justice and peace traditions that are intrinsic to Mennonite faith.

But none of this has anything to do with Geez. Except for the social justice stuff which comes through beautifully in the magazine. It’s a very good-looking magazine — full-colour cover, black and white pages. Thought-provoking, subversive imagery througout. I’m not going to bring up the words “postmodern” or “emergent” because those are stupid descriptors that no one really understands anyway. If you don’t like this magazine, it’s because it’s not made for you. This magazine is made for me. And only me. No, what I mean is that it’s meant to speak to people like me who are interested in looking at Christianity and faith in new ways, casting a critical eye on the institutions associated therewith, and having pretty pictures at which to look. And irony. Lots of irony.

I’m always on the lookout for style masquerading as substance. Geez has plenty of style, but if that’s all there were I could have burned through the mag in one sitting. The articles are all quite short, but I don’t consider that a liability necessarily, especially since I have a pathetic attention span. They’re short but meaty. Or proteiny, tofu-y, if you’re vegetarian and dislike my previous metaphor. Some are more tofu-y than others. Some are longer than others, too, and I think in the future the magazine could benefit from lengthier pieces, along the lines of my all-time favourite magazine, Bitch. Speaking of Bitch (A Feminist Response to Pop Culture), Geez gets a million points from me for mentioning my favourite magazine in a positive light, in a chart expressing “Gospel Dilution Index,” i.e., the percentage of any magazine that’s devoted to advertising. Christianity Today weighs in at 44%, Bitch at 12%, and Geez, currently, at zero.

Perhaps the magazine’s only striking liability is the one-page tutorial on how to make your own home altar, but if I weren’t familiar with and skeptical of emergent mumbo-jumbo, I probably would have thought that was cool rather than cliché.

What I did love about the magazine is the amount of new stuff — that is, stuff I haven’t heard before. Marshall McLuhan (Peg City Represent) as Prophet. John Francis, revolutionary planet-walker. Revenge/forgiveness in Haiti. Then there’s the Diana Thorneycroft, non-pukey poetry, Maude Barlow, Emily Carr, Arundhati Roy, Michelle Shocked. These are the kinds of voices you find in Geez and freakin’ dig it.

Speaking of voices — the guys who do this magazine are just that, guys, which is slightly unfortunate due to the fact that too many voices in progressive Chrisitian publishing are male. But it’s not Will Braun and Aiden Enns’ fault they were born male, and I think they’ve put together content with enough diversity to make up for it — an United Church clergywoman, a black American writer/peace activist. Plenty of women all around. I don’t think the content gender split is quite at 50/50, but I haven’t made a tallychart, which I normally would have done, but I’m on Geez’s side, here, so I’m willing to let it slide for the moment. Maybe for issue #2 I’ll get out the calculator.

Some of your favourite bloggers appear, as well, including I Married the Pastor’s deceptive ditziness.

There’s no such thing as the perfect magazine (well, except for maybe Bitch), but I’m proud to be a Geez supporter. Those Mennonite boys. They make good every most of the time. If you haven’t done, subscribe now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2006 at 3:48 pm and is filed under magazines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.