Dear Readers,

New ventures are, if we allow them to be, the perfect opportunity to revisit old choices, entrenched beliefs, or comfortable habits of mind. Though we could theoretically take an inventory of the way we live at any time, it can feel more possible when we are taking the first steps into something new.

As Fare Forward launches our own new journey into print, I wanted to take stock of our identity as a publication, to ask what are frequently called the “Big Questions”: Who are we? Why are we doing what we’re doing? Is it worthwhile? What quickly became clear, though, is that questions like these are built on the foundation of other, more basic questions, like Where does meaning come from? and How do we know if our beliefs are true?

The Kingdoms of Knowledge issue is built around these underlying questions. We asked our writers to survey what they knew and how they knew it. We wanted them to point to times when an answer came from an unexpected place, or even from a completely different domain of knowledge than where they expected to find it. What emerged is not so much a map of the kingdoms of knowledge as a key to that map—a guide to reading it as you make your own discoveries and draw your own borders. We hope it will be a help to you as you determine which road to follow, and what questions to ask. 

Both Collin Slowey, in “How to Believe the Truth,” and Katy Carl, in “A Taste for Delight,” take a look at what practices we can adopt to shape us into the kinds of people who love the true and the beautiful. In “Congratulations on Your Admission to the College of Augurs,” Charlie Clark invites us to think about what it is possible to know—and how much some well-respected ways of knowing have in common with magical thinking. In the Fare Forward interview, Dr. Angel Adams Parham shares her journey into the world of classical education, and her passion for helping children and young people adopt the quest for the transcendentals in their own lives.

And finally, you may be asking: why print? For me, the answer comes from the research I did for my master’s thesis last spring. As I looked into the work of four master printers whose work in printing shaped and changed the way that they wrote, I was reminded that all of human communication is inherently physical. We read with our eyes (or hands); we speak with our mouths; we hear with our ears; we write (or type, or sign) with our hands—and so on. Absent an unforeseen advance in telepathy, we simply cannot communicate without our bodies.

Certainly, we still use our eyes when we read on a screen. But we are more divorced from the physical reality of this bridge between the self and the other when we sit alone and text each other links than when we meet up for drinks and hand one another dog-eared, underlined copies of our latest read. I want Fare Forward to be a participant in that second kind of communication, and we’re trying to make that easy. I hope you will put your name in the bookplate we’ve provided on the inside front cover and then lend this copy with abandon. I hope you will get it back with a conversation and little human connection. I hope you will tell us how it went.

Fare forward,
Sarah Clark
Editor-in-Chief