Editorial

This issue of the Toronto Journal of Theology offers a rich variety of papers. As a journal sponsored by an ecumenical consortium of theological schools, it seems most appropriate to begin our overview with an essay that offers a lens on perspectives on ecumenical efforts. Our first essay by Antoine Arjakovsky draws a new "cartography of the Church" in the postmodern era in reviewing the fruits of the past fifty years of ecumenical work which has arrived at a common understanding in the focus on Christian initiation and the pedagogy related to it as central to the Church's mission. Despite this widespread common agreement, lack of recognition will continue, given what he regards as natural inclinations toward fissiparous grouping. He identifies these, inter alia, according to three representations: the Church as "ark of salvation," "Body of Christ," or "temple of the Spirit." The article by Marko Zlomislić evaluates Slovoj Zizek's project of constructing a contemporary leftist anti-capitalist critique in the global corporate age. Because Zizek's reading of Kierkegaard ignores the crucial dimensions of religious self as grounding for community in favour of the political and secular, Zizek's political theology is grounded only in what results in the absence of such religious recognition: despair.

In an essay developed from presentation at the joint session of the Canadian Corporation for the Study of Religion meeting in Montreal, 2010, Justo Gonzales discusses the rather surprising or ironic result of the great expansion of Protestant mission in its second colonial wave in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Christianity is en route to being truly catholic in the sense of a global religion with no single centre but with lively continuing growth in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He speaks to the creative power that has always issued from the margins and interstitial spaces of the world, whether that be the New Testament authors whose work was written outside Jerusalem, the reformation in semi-barbaric Germany, or the current vitality in Latin America and beyond. Jeffrey Morrow draws our attention to a now little known but influential French intellectual who contributed to the development of biblical criticism, seventeenth-century Isaac La Peyrère. His "source-critical" reading of Genesis 1-3 as accounts of two difference races—gentiles and Jews—contributed to the development of a unique form of dual messianism, which was yoked to his vision of the overthrow of King Louis xiv in favour of a Protestant king, his patron the prince of Condé. In the sixth essay in this volume, Nimi Wariboko writes about the major concern animating Peter Paris's work, that of racism and poverty in American society and abroad. He discusses a range of influences that shaped Paris's social critique and engaged political ethics, from classical ethicists and the twentieth-century pragmatic tradition of Dewey, Niebuhr, and Du Bois to the experience of the black church in which he was steeped. His particular kind of evasive ethics he terms a form of spirituals.

Darren Hynes and Bernard Wills offer a second part to an article previously published in this journal on the work of Daniel Dennett. In assessing the implications of biological determinism, they argue that his recent book Breaking the Spell is an exercise in political propaganda that implicitly polemicizes against the practice of religion, if in a more subtle way than other atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Patrizia Granziera's work takes us abroad to South India to chart the terrain of the eighteenth-century missionary scholar Costanzo Beschi. His work with the Tamils included the development of a Christian vernacular of visual images connected with the Immaculate Virgin Mary. He "indigenized" Mary into the traditional constellation of Tamil and South Indian goddess imagery and narratives, thereby changing both the character of Catholic Mary and Tamil Christianity. The final essay in the volume was presented at the Jay Newman Lecture in Philosophy of Religion at the Annual Canadian Theological Society Meeting of the Congress of Learned Societies in May 2011. Robert Larmer addresses the sometimes contested topic of miracle in identifying three perspectives: occasionalist, deist, and supernaturalist. He looks at...