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About The Lamp

The Lamp is a lay-edited Catholic magazine published in print six times a year. We do not adhere to a fixed editorial line; what we oppose—utilitarianism, techno-optimism, reductive accounts of human nature, attempts to sand down the crooked timber of humanity or subsume our aspirations into political, social, and economic frameworks—is more important.

Like Horace Walpole, we sometimes find ourselves “drawn by some strange attraction from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd.” The magazine could be described as “highbrow,” but the editors agree with Thomas Mallon that “the brow that’s really in danger of disappearing is the furrowed one.” Our sympathies are with the human race rather than the chatbot. Our program, to the extent that we have one, could be described as “Christian humanism,” in the tradition that runs from Erasmus to Pope Benedict XVI.

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