The major problem in editing a journal of ideas like First Things is that most of our contributors are academics, and many academics, not to put too fine a point on it, write barbaric prose. Graduate education ruins writers under the guise of inducting them into the academic priesthood. Academics are taught to write for other academics, which means adopting a particular discipline's distinctive language. The result, often even in the humanities, is that scholars communicate in a needlessly opaque jargon decipherable only to those who have mastered the code of the club. It's the equivalent of a secret handshake.
Most academics welcome efforts to make their prose more accessible.
Some, however, suspect that to translate Academese into standard English is to dumb it down. A few genuinely seem to prefer obscurity and to confuse it with profundity. Editors have a self-effacing vocation. Theirs is a hidden glory. My colleague Richard John Neuhaus tells my favorite editor story.