Why Portico? (ft. Micah Mattix)

First Things Podcast

First Things

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2026

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Micah Mattix joins R. R. Reno on The Editor's Desk to talk about Portico, a new literary quarterly published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The truth never goes out of style, and First Things relies on readers like you to keep promoting
0:05.3	the truth in public life. For the price of one cup of coffee per month, you can access all our
0:10.7	subscriber perks and support the important work of First Things. Visit Firstthings.com
0:15.8	slash subscribe to gain full access to all of our articles as well as our prestigious monthly print edition.
0:22.1	That's first things.com slash subscribe.
0:30.1	Hello, welcome to the editor's desk.
0:32.6	This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine.
0:39.7	I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things Magazine. And I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.
0:49.5	I'd like to welcome Micah Maddox to the podcast. and today we are going to talk about an exciting new venture that he launched on behalf of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the publisher First Things, and it's a new publication called Portico, a literary quarterly.
1:07.5	So, Micah, welcome to the podcast.
1:09.9	Thanks.
1:10.2	So tell us, you're the editor,
1:13.6	impresario, the incubator of this new venture. Tell us what is Portico? Yeah, great. So Portico,
1:22.4	the name actually first comes from, this was a literary publication that was proposed the 1950s in England that
1:29.8	had both C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot behind it. And the idea was to bring heaven and earth
1:36.5	together, as they put it in one tagline, and never actually saw the light of day. And so I took
1:42.8	the name from that initial venture. My hope for Portico is to do
1:47.2	something similar. I don't know that we'll actually bring heaven and earth together. But to do
1:54.1	something similar is to create a space for art pieces, book pieces on architecture, history of ideas, philosophy even,
2:04.4	that is informed by the Judeo-Christian point of view, but yet is outward facing.
2:11.2	It's not just addressed to fellow believers or even agnostics, but folks who are further afield. And so the publication is a
2:21.2	literary publication, and so it's going to cover books and arts. It's going to cover history as well.
	...

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