After acquisition, Crisis Magazine re-launches website

Feb 10, 2012 / 00:59 am

Crisis Magazine relaunched its website on Feb. 7, after being recently acquired. The magazine's new leaders are promising to focus on providing a Catholic perspective on politics, culture, business, faith and family life.

“You can count on Crisis Magazine to be what it always was,” said editor John Zmirak, who summarized the magazine as “a firm, insistent voice on the rights of the laity and the dignity of the priesthood; a partisan of justice and prudence in the face of misguided compassion and ideology; a staunch advocate of the compatibility of reason and faith, of honest enterprise and Christian living, of American patriotism and orthodox Faith.”

Zmirak has previously served as writer-in-residence at Thomas More College and as editor of Success magazine and Investor’s Business Daily.

Under a joint acquisition by the Merrimack, N.H.-based Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and the Atlanta-based Holy Spirit College, Crisis Magazine will operate under Sophia Institute Press, the publishing division of the two colleges.

William Fahey, Thomas More College president and publisher of Sophia Institute Press, said American culture “lacks a credible, coherent defense of the faith.”

“Crisis proposes to address this problem by assembling leading Catholic thinkers who will equip readers with the knowledge and confidence they need to defend the market economy and Church teachings.”

University professors Michael Novak and Ralph McInerny founded Crisis magazine in 1982. It became an online-only magazine in 2007, operating at the address www.CrisisMagazine.com.

Sophia Institute acquired the magazine earlier in 2012.

The Pope has encouraged the faithful to embrace the new media to advance the Gospel, noted Gareth Genner, president of Holy Spirit College and chairman of Sophia Institute Press.

He said his college’s partnership with Thomas More College helps in “laying the groundwork” to expand Sophia Institute as a publisher of Catholic books and as a “multi-platform media company dedicated to advancing the New Evangelization.”

In November 2011, Sophia Institute Press announced its acquisition of the Catholic Exchange web portal. The press was founded in 1983 and has published both Catholic classics and new texts. It has published over 200 titles and 2.5 million books.

Holy Spirit College was founded in 2005 as a Catholic undergraduate liberal arts college. It admitted its first full-time undergraduate class in 2009, while also admitting graduate students in theology.