This issue marks 5 years as Editor in Chief of The Linacre Quarterly. It's been an interesting and educational journey and I have enjoyed it. When I pause to consider what I have experienced in the last 5 years, a few things stand out:
Our partnership with Sage has been very productive. The publishing industry is changing and Sage helps us stay current with their support to authors as well as the journal itself. The newly updated website showcases our content in a variety of effective ways, including the ability to provide content in designated collections according to topic. At present, we have only one, on Assisted Reproduction. Collections include articles from 1986 forward. We can use some help in compiling additional collections. Suggestions and volunteers are welcome!
We are truly a team even though we never meet in person. I work out of Tennessee; our US director is in California, and the rest of our team is in India and the Philippines. The virtual workplace is nothing new to us. Communications are seamless and our dispersed Sage staff means that work on the journal goes on almost around the clock.
We are attracting a wider range of authors. About 25% of our manuscripts are from authors outside of the US, making us truly a voice of Catholic medicine. Sage has been helpful in providing strategies for increasing the diversity of our editorial staff as well and we would welcome new volunteers to assist with the nuts and bolts of getting the journal out the door.
Patients deserve medical care that respects their personal values and needs. That means Catholic patients are entitled to physicians who respect their Catholic beliefs—and that isn’t always the case. Even secular physicians need a basic understanding of how the Catholic faith shapes medical care if they are going to care for Catholic patients. How can we leverage The Linacre Quarterly to make such and understanding and respect a reality in the broader culture?
We would benefit from a larger social media footprint. Print media is decreasing in its importance; younger physicians rely far more on electronic modes of communication. Ideally, we need the assistance of younger physicians and medical students, who are more adept at using social media and who better understand the platforms that are effective, especially internet-based videos as they become more important in communications. We’d also benefit from outreach to medical schools and training programs, alerting them to content relevant to their specialty. If we are to get the word out about the quality content of The Linacre Quarterly, we need to do it in a way that people will hear it.
Even so, physician-to-physician contact is still a very effective way of spreading the word about Catholic medicine. The presence of well-educated Catholic physicians in the doctor's lounge, conversing with colleagues, is one of the best ways to raise awareness of what Catholic medicine has to offer. Sharing issues of The Linacre Quarterly is a great way to spread the word and spark curiosity.
Even though it is expanding, our Catholic audience is still limited. Our readership has increased over the last 5 years but most Catholic physicians are not engaged with the CMA and don’t read this journal. Why not? About 65% of physicians still report themselves as religious, and of those, a quarter identify as Catholic. That means that there should be about 160,000 Catholic physicians in the United States. We have a lot of room to grow our audience. We need to ask why these physicians are not inclined to engage with other Catholic physicians. How can The Linacre Quarterly meet the needs of these physicians? How can we attract their interest and their contributions?
Others recognize the value of The Linacre Quarterly. We continue garner awards from the Catholic Media Association for excellence in a variety of categories from essays to in-depth and analytical writing, to editorials. Our content continues to be on the cutting edge of important issues such as vaccine production, artificial intelligence, and gender dysphoria.
We need to plan now for another 90 years of excellence. The Linacre Quarterly depends on the help of dedicated volunteers interested in helping maintain its presence as a voice of Catholic medicine. In particular, we need young voices and a variety of them. Medical school and post-graduate training are very different than they were almost 50 years ago when I graduated. There are more women in medicine and classes are more diverse in age and ethnicity than they were back then. Practices are changing, internally and externally: new procedures, new techniques, new drugs, new diseases as well as changing technology and changing economic and organizational structures. We need people familiar with medicine as it is today to help shape the future of The Linacre Quarterly.
As our website so aptly puts it:
The Linacre Quarterly is in a unique position to provide a forum to explore the ethical questions that modern medicine poses and to bring the great riches of Catholic thought to bear on those questions and into the public square….[It] brings a holistic approach to the patient, integrating findings from clinical medicine with psychology, sociology, and religion in order to elucidate bioethical issues and their impact on patients, health-care workers, and medical systems in the setting of society and the extant culture.
I am grateful for the chance to work with such a remarkable publication and such interesting and dynamic people in bringing that mission to fruition. I look forward to the coming year's adventures.
