Pilgrims of Hope, Scholars of Imagination
As I proofread this issue while the coverage of Pope Francis’s life and legacy unfolded, it struck me how many of the themes and issues that preoccupied him are echoed here. By Wendy McDowell
Category: Perspective
When Only Poetry Will Do
What strikes me about this issue of the Bulletin is that it is a ringing endorsement of the humanities. Our authors come from many different disciplines: Black women’s studies, history, anthropology, psychology, Islamic studies, theology, ethics and politics. By Wendy McDowell
Places of Refuge from Hate
Scholars pay careful attention to language and how it intersects with power, a skill that is dearly needed in a “post-truth” climate. By Wendy McDowell
Improvisations in the Key of Life
Inspired by Raymond Carr’s extended metaphor of musicality and theological language, I would say that the authors here are searching for a new key, calling us to a “radical dynamism” as they model the kinds of improvisation needed to meet the stark realities of our time. By Wendy McDowell
Making a Space for ‘Alternative Spiritualities’
One of the most important expressions of spiritual emergence today is the work Indigenous communities are doing to defend threatened ecosystems through spiritual practice. By Dan McKanan
How Do We Think and Act Anew?
This is the other main theme running through the issue: the need to “treat our materials seriously” and use our creative powers to imagine—indeed, to build—what is not yet, as Lipscomb puts it, “to create a world we have not seen.” By Wendy McDowell
Connection
How might grieving, as a form of love and remembering, shape our responses to a changing planet? Terry Tempest Williams with Victoria Chang
Trauma, Friendship, and Awakened Possibilities
This issue is not for the faint of heart, and yet I find the pieces here to be uplifting because they provide us with models and methods for endurance, reparation, and the awakening of new possibilities. By Wendy McDowell
Slow Transformations, Small Windows of Light
The authors here challenge us to think more carefully about what responsible and responsive care looks like, and one clear through line in this issue is that “right mind” and “right relationship” go hand in hand; you cannot have one without the other. By Wendy McDowell
Blessed Are the Caregivers
The authors in this issue are chaplains, faith leaders, and professors. In these roles, they lament inequities, cry out for change, and demonstrate how to “treat the people’s needs as holy.” By Wendy McDowell
Paradise Waiting: The Power to Comfort
All kinds of power are explored here—personal, spiritual, political, and institutional power—and though they address disparate contexts, the pieces speak to one another in poignant ways. By Wendy McDowell
Filling in the Contours of ‘Unbelievers’
The authors in this issue do not lament or apologize for these shifts; they dive deeper into why they are happening, where the unaffiliated are gathering, and how they are making meaning. By Wendy McDowell
Flipping the Script
In this issue are models of courageous practices, scholarship, and creative work grounded in communities already practiced in the art of script-flipping. By Wendy McDowell
Embodied Practices, (Re)lived History
Yom Kippur is one example among many in Judaism, demonstrating the way in which the past becomes an ever-present history–a history that is relived, reenacted, every day, through every prayer, in every holiday. By Rachel Slutsky
Multiple Lenses, Essential Gestures
It strikes me that most of the articles in this issue involve putting on new lenses so that we might make different gestures. By Wendy McDowell
The Way of the Still, Small Voice
Editor’s introduction to the Autumn/Winter 2017 issue. By Wendy McDowell
Bearing Witness
This moment in history makes a claim on us all. By Stephanie Paulsell
Rethinking the Sacred
For the authors in this issue, experiences of film, literature, and sound are often inseparable from religious experience. By Ingrid Norton
Nurturing Necessary Conversations
Interwoven themes of voice and expression, close relationship, conversation, and community run through this issue. By Julie Barker Gillette
Making Room
A thread running through a majority of the essays in this issue has to do with hospitality to the “stranger” and its opposite—hostility, fortification, and exclusion. Who do we let in, and who do we try to keep out? By Wendy McDowell
