The current issue opens the second volume of the continuing celebration of the golden anniversary of Horizons. The authors of the peer-reviewed articles and special features provide rich fare for contemplation. Two articles offer perspectives on overlooked aspects of Augustine: the doctrine of deification in Augustine (Michael M. C. Reardon) and the role of Augustine in the thought of John Courtney Murray (Dennis J. Wieboldt III). Leaping from the first century to the twentieth century, Teilhard de Chardin is featured in quite distinct ways by two authors. John P. Slattery probes the topic “The Extent and Impact of Racism and Eugenics in the Writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ” while Matthew J. Gummess examines “A Pied Theological Cosmology: Alejandro García-Rivera’s Gift to Science” in comparison to de Chardin. Cyril Orji provides new insights into the Joseph story with his “A Reappropriation of the Joseph Story in Genesis 39 and Surah 12 for Contemporary Race-Discourse.”
Our special features include an editorial essay, the third anniversary roundtable, and reflections on Horizons by editor emeritus, Anthony J. Godzieba. Kathleen Holscher’s editorial essay “A Priest, a Ranch, and los Muchachos: A Study of Race and Clerical Abuse from New Mexico,” provides a disturbing account of Fr. Ed Donelan and challenges us to look beyond the “dumping ground” theory to explain clerical sexual abuse.
The “Retrospective and Prospective Roundtable,” the third in the anniversary series, features a reprint of the influential “Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?,” written in 1986 by Sandra Schneiders. Professor Min-Ah Cho of Georgetown University explains that a renewed appreciation for Schneiders’s work is necessary to counter popular trends that disconnect spirituality from “its historical contexts as well as its roots in religious traditions.” Placing Schneiders’s article in the wider context of her work, Cho guides the reader through essential dimensions of Schneiders’s approach to the relationship between spirituality and theology and identifies important areas for interrogation and development in the study of spirituality needed in the present moment.
Part of the celebration of the anniversary has been to highlight the work and perspectives of the former editors. Our June 2023 issue featured founding editor Rodger Van Allen’s account of the origins of the journal while in our December 2023 edition I focused on the significant contributions of Walter Conn. In this issue, I am excited to welcome back to the pages of “From the Editor” the editor who shepherded the journal into the digital age, my immediate predecessor, Anthony Godzieba. His important retrospective concludes this editorial note.
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As we continue our anniversary celebration, I thank our authors past and present for sharing their scholarship with our readers, and I thank all of the members of the current Horizons editorial team for their collegiality, our spirit of mutual support, inspiring creativity, diligent work, and unwavering commitment to excellent scholarship.
Random Notes from a Former Editor
During my time as editor of Horizons (first as coeditor with Walter Conn in 2005–2007, thereafter as editor until 2015), several noteworthy things happened. I’ll focus on two of them here. The first was what one could call a major shift in infrastructure, and the second was the subtle yet noticeable shift in the journal’s content.
First there is the shift in “infrastructure.” In my early years as editor, it quickly became clear that for a scholarly journal not to have a full-text online presence was tantamount to not existing. Horizons did have some kind of minimal presence through ATLA (the American Theological Libraries Association), but we could never successfully determine how widespread that access was, even after taking an informal survey of members regarding their institutions’ libraries. Our two-person office—editorial assistant Irene Noble and I—puzzled over who to contact and how to proceed. Out of the clear blue sky, in October 2011, I received an email from Martine Walsh, at that time the senior commissioning editor of humanities and social science journals for Cambridge University Press (CUP), who wondered if I would be interested in speaking with her at the upcoming AAR/SBL Annual Meeting about having Horizons join with CUP and thereby have a full-text online presence through their journals platform. CUP had been looking for a quality scholarly Catholic publication for their group of journals. After a very positive meeting with her, and after some months of discussions among CUP, Horizons, and the board of the College Theology Society, a contract was signed with CUP in September 2012, and the first issue of Horizons published under the CUP imprint appeared in June 2013. To call this a “game-changer” would be to grossly underestimate its importance: Horizons was now published by one of the most highly esteemed university presses, one with a long and deep pedigree. The journal’s full-text online presence was immediately global, and its back issues were being digitized for even more comprehensive access. The changes to the hard-copy journal—a new cover and new interior design—were striking.
At the same time, the office was also changing. Our colleague Elena Procario-Foley, who had already joined the journal as assistant editor in 2009 and played an important role in our negotiations with CUP, was named associate editor in 2013. Irene Noble, whose long tenure and unflappable guidance were familiar to Horizons’s authors and reviewers, and whose lilting voice inhabited even her emails, retired while the transition to CUP was occurring. Her successor was Sarah Glaser, newly graduated from Bryn Mawr College, whose expertise and hard work smoothed the way of the transition; in the summer of 2014, she left to take a position with a New York publisher. Christine Bucher then joined us, bringing to the journal more than a decade’s worth of publishing experience. Christine became as invaluable as Irene had been, guiding the increasing behind-the-scenes workflow with an innovative spirit and a steady hand. It was imperative for me to work out with Villanova University a promotion for her from editorial assistant to managing editor (same work, new title, better salary) in recognition of her many contributions to the journal. On my retirement from the editor’s chair in 2015, I felt very confident that the infrastructure of the journal was prepared for the future and that its operations were in caring and experienced hands.
The other shift to mention occurred with the content of the journal—nothing monumental, but rather a subtle move toward more interdisciplinary thinking about issues in theology and religious studies. From the start of my term as editor, and with Elena in agreement once she joined me on the masthead, our aim was to “throw the net wide,” so to speak, and have a balance between established scholars and younger scholars in the process of developing their scholarly voices. What this approach also resulted in was an exposure to a wider range of methodologies in theology and religious studies, especially the growth of interdisciplinary approaches. One thing that has always distinguished Horizons has been a focus on the “chiasmus” of faith and religiosity on the one hand, and the contemporary context on the other. (Rather than “intersection,” I have used Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s richly nuanced term that describes the criss-crossing or interlacing of the visible and the invisible in the world of lived experience.) It is precisely this interlacing of faith and culture that, in my estimation, has marked some of the finest scholarly thinking and writing in Horizons. I attribute this to the perennial concern of the members of the College Theology Society with the undergraduate audiences that they are primarily teaching and the need for a feet-on-the-ground approach to the study of religiosity and particularly to Roman Catholicism in contemporary society.
However, my own viewpoint as a phenomenologist and as a fundamental and systematic theologian unavoidably comes into play here when I worry that the concern for interdisciplinarity can have its cost: less of a focus on fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) and more emphasis put on the methods of diagnosing culture offered by sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, identity politics, and so forth. As I argued once in an editorial (Horizons 41, no. 2, December 2014), the theologian’s task is always twofold: to give an immediate contextual answer when asked to give “an explanation [apologia] for the reason for our hope” (1 Pet 3:15) and to unpack and examine over the long term the implications of our faith-claims (Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectus). As I said there, “The meaning of faith is not all clear at first sight; we must work at achieving as much understanding as we can. We theologians do so by using the materials of experience in which our faith is embedded, the embodied experiences from which we have knitted together our lives and which have been inflected by the historical and cultural settings where they have occurred. Here is theology’s hidden life: when pointing to God, at the same time it discloses possibilities for holiness within everyday life lived out in ordinary times and places.” Horizons has always been especially strong at working out this exquisite balance. My hope for this fiftieth anniversary is that the journal may continue to thrive and its scholarship may continue to contribute to a world and a church that needs that hope.
