The Road to Kismet

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

Kismet has had a journey in finding a name. After all, what do you call a literary magazine tasked with exploring “spirituality, religion, and mysticism for seekers and skeptics alike”?

“Heathen” was one early option. Editor in chief Samuel Rutter liked its playfulness––it was a term his grandmother often used growing up. Ultimately, the word’s history proved to be too contentious. “Schism” was another. (Too confrontational.) Rutter and Alec Gewirtz, the magazine’s editor and publisher, eventually settled on “Amulet” and posted the first issue online under that name in early March. The week of the launch party, however, they received a cease-and-desist from a book publisher that operates a children’s imprint under the same name. Rather than fight it, they decided to go back to the drawing board––and to throw out dozens of tote bags already branded with the moniker. Kismet, as the magazine is now known, was suggested by a friend of Rutter’s who worked in banking. It checked all the boxes: nondenominational, inviting, and six letters long, enabling it to be easily worked into the existing design logo. “A lot of people have told us, ‘Actually, I like Kismet better,’” Rutter insisted. 

This prolonged search for identity was perhaps a fitting way for a new magazine about modern American spirituality to get its start. Rutter, a longtime editor, and Gewirtz, the CEO of a progressive spirituality company, envision Kismet as an outlet for engaging with spirituality beyond the confines of how it has traditionally been defined by conservatives. In their Issue One editor’s letter, they note that the right “has tried to lay claim not only to traditional religion but also non-religious ‘spirituality’”—pointing to, for instance, the rise of pseudoscientific wellness influencers and the prominent role of a New Age teacher as the “director of messaging” for now–secretary of health Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s failed presidential bid. “We think it would be a big mistake if the left reacts to how the right has appropriated spirituality by rejecting spirituality altogether,” Gewirtz said.

At the heart of the publication is a premise that conservatives might agree with: religious practice is in decline in America, and with that has come a costly loss of ritual and community. Recent research studies showed that 92 percent of Americans hold a spiritual belief in an afterlife or god, but only 30 percent of Americans attend weekly religious services. “There are enormous spiritual hungers, and the long-standing ways of meeting those hungers aren’t resonating for so many people,” Gewirtz said. 

One solution the editors arrived at was to make the publication more about creative inquiry than restrictive definitions of the terms of spirituality. “We aren’t in the business of feeling like we need to be arbiters of whether someone’s spiritual experience is real or fake,” Rutter said. “Instead, as a literary magazine, we can operate within a space of unknowing.” In the inaugural issue, Lamorna Ash finds “sacred texts” in unexpected places: the twelfth-century love story of Héloïse and Abelard, the relationship between the performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay (who once walked more than a thousand miles to break up with each other), and even the text messages on her phone. K-Ming Chang delivers a work of fiction that the editors describe as “new myth.”

Other early contributions advance Rutter and Gewirtz’s belief that literary pursuits are inherently spiritual—even if that connection isn’t always easy to see. Sheila Heti explores the challenge she faced writing “about the ineffable” during an assignment for Harper’s magazine. “A magazine gets its identity from having a strict sense of what defines it, and what defines it is wrapped up with what it believes reality is,” Heti writes. “When one is writing non-fiction for a magazine, one is always telling a story. But the mystical realm exists outside of story.” Heti offers no easy answer to the dilemma she identifies. This disconnect—or the presumption of one—was one of the initial challenges Rutter and Gewirtz faced while putting together the magazine: so many writers they approached didn’t perceive themselves as fitting in to a publication about spirituality. “Some of them said to me, ‘I’m not particularly religious,’ ‘I’m not particularly spiritual,’” Rutter said. “And I had some of their own writing ready to read back to them to say, well, this is.”

Gewirtz, who is also a writer, has experience advocating these ideas. He is the CEO of a company called Nearness, which is organized as a member-owned cooperative and puts on multiweek virtual workshops for progressive organizations “interested in the spiritual infrastructure of the future.” “The main thing we’ve done is create a bunch of different community offerings,” he said of Nearness, because “spiritual seeking is very lonely. It’s a person one on one with an influencer on Tiktok, or one on one with a self-help book, but no structure of community.” Kismet is funded in part through income generated by Nearness’s workshops and grants.

Gewirtz wants Kismet to have an “independent identity” from his day job, but he certainly hopes it will provide another venue for the same kind of community building and connection, including through public events and readings. “Where do people go, if they’re not in a religious congregation, to talk about the biggest questions of life, the spiritual dimension of life?” Gewirtz said. “We want, among other things, to be a venue.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correctly identify Alec Gewirtz.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.