And there are a few outstanding ones ( Relief, Rock & Sling, Ruminate, Image, and others). As it turns out, there are a fair number of literary journals that focus on Christian or religious writing. It needed to serve a purpose, have a mission, be different in some way. Too, I’ve wanted to start a journal for a long time, but I didn’t just want to create yet another generic one. My realm of expertise in the arts is writing and literature, and in that form especially there aren’t enough examples of Christian art that rise above what any objective observer would call average.
In fact Christian art should be held to a higher standard (as it was for many centuries). Not to the arts, not to the artists, and least of all to God. Call it Christian art and you get something of a pass on mainstream standards for quality. And I’ve also felt for many years that the subset or arts that’s labeled “Christian” has an artificially low barrier to entry. That’s a flimsy way of saying that I’ve been an editor for a long time and there are few things I enjoy more than talking and working with authors on revision.
Greater Sum is a project launched over the summer in an attempt to fuse my knowledge and skills with my desires and hopes. (Sorry, Leyna, for not following your literary journal naming guidelines.) We’re debuting the first issue at the West Coast Christian Writers Conference, where I’m on the faculty, in just a few days. What’s that? Why, that’s a literary journal called Greater Sum. Things have been quiet around here, eh? The usual excuses apply: holiday craziness, family illness, general ineptitude.