Working Closely

The process of assembling a journal has many aspects largely unseen by the reader. Final editing is an intense activity, where I have worked closely with the managing editor at Purdue University Press to bring the issue to the point we are satisfied to send it off to the printer, and to post the articles on the website. Since becoming editor of the journal, I have collaborated at this phase with Dr. Margaret Hunt of Purdue University Press. Margaret has a keen eye for good, taut writing and abundant patience for detail. Her extended illness left a hole in the small team that produces each issue. Only very recently has the able help of Dianna Gilroy, a doctoral student in English at Purdue, allowed us to move forward with what you now have in hand. Dianna brings experience editing for the prominent journal Modern Fiction Studies and has helped immensely with the demands of final production.

I am pleased, too, to welcome two book review editors, David Granger and Timothy Mahoney. With this issue and the next, more than the usual number of reviews will be published so as to allow David and Tim their chance to shape this important part of the journal.

Beginning their terms on the board with the next issue are Aaron Cooley, Kathy Hytten, and Kersten Reich; while Jesse Goodman, O. L. Davis Jr., and Bill Doll depart with my thanks for their excellent work on behalf of the Society.

The articles and reviews before you explore areas of continuing and new interest in thought related to Dewey and his legacy. Scott Stroud discusses art as "evocative communication" through an analysis of Dewey's aesthetics, contending that "art, a seemingly obscure and indirect means of communication, can be used as the most effective and moving means of communication in certain circumstances." A panel of authors (Craig A. Cunningham, David Granger, Jane Fowler Morse, Barbara Stengel, and Terri Wilson) looks at how women and "weirdoes" influenced Dewey's development, and conclude with a discussion of the rewards for scholars of dialogue across difference. Shane Ralston disputes Victor Kestenbaum's phenomenological reading of Dewey's theism in A Common Faith, and argues for "naturalistically unifying the real and the ideal under the heading of the religious." Book reviews by Aaron Cooley, Patti Marxsen, Matthew Pamental, and Dale Snauwaert complete the issue.