100 Years Completed!
Rent from DeepDyve- 100 Years Completed!
With this issue, we bring to a close our year-long celebration of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. It is a significant achievement for a journal to reach 100 years of publication (even if under different names). And we are delighted to know that the journal is just as strong today as it has ever been.
As our regular readers know, we have celebrated this 100th volume by re-publishing historically important essays from past issues—followed by new responses to those articles that put them in historical context and delineate the continuing significance of their ideas and arguments. We labelled these collections of pieces ReSoundings.
In this last issue for the year, we focus ReSoundings in the area of ethics—certainly fitting given the connection between the journal and the Society for Values in Higher Education (SVHE). And the articles we are republishing could not be any more important. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is one of the most important books in moral theory written in the twentieth century—its impact moving beyond the academy and into public policy and political discourse (often in concealed, but powerful ways). In the spring 1984 issue of Soundings, we published a review of MacIntyre’s book written by Richard J. Bernstein, who (like MacIntyre) is a powerful philosophical voice and a prolific writer. The Bernstein review (one of the most widely circulated reviews of MacIntyre’s book) was followed by a rejoinder from MacIntyre. To have these two philosophical giants battle it out in the pages of Soundings was a real treat. We re-print both essays here in this issue.
Revisiting that debate in this issue reveals the continuing relevance of the moral issues, problems, and arguments with which they engaged. We have two respondents whose work will help us further understand the debate. David Hoekema of Calvin College, former president of SVHE and current chair [End Page v] of the Editorial Board of Soundings, and Allen Dunn of the University of Tennessee, former editor of Soundings and current president of SVHE, each provide compelling insights about the debate and its continuing relevance.
The ReSoundings section is followed by other contemporary work focused on issues in ethics. First, is an important piece by Luciana Lolich and Kathleen Lynch of University College Dublin. Their work on the ethics of palliative care gets to some central issues that must be considered in thinking about human autonomy, choice, and cultural values. Then, we feature two reviews on recent books in ethics: Stephen Bloch-Schulman of Elon University’s review of Elizabeth Minnich’s The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking, and Thomas D. Kennedy of Berry College’s response to Michael Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life.
We hope you enjoy this last issue of our celebratory 100th year. And many thanks to all of our readers who provided such positive feedback on our ReSoundings initiative this year.
Happy reading!
Footnotes
Editor’s Note: In the last issue of Soundings, we featured a re-print of an article by Michael Novak. We failed to acknowledge his passing this year. Dr. Novak was an incredibly accomplished theologian and public intellectual, and many of our most important conversations will be diminished by the absence of his voice. [End Page vi]
