Introduction

This year, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal will publish volume 100. It is a momentous occasion for the journal and the academy. Few academic publications can claim such a continuous history of publication, let alone match the high quality of work published in Soundings and its previous incarnations.

Soundings started in 1917, but with a very different name, mission, and audience.¹ At that time it was called The American College Bulletin, and it was published under that name until 1919, when it became Christian Education. In 1953, another name change gave us The Christian Scholar. Eventually, the Society for Values in Higher Education took over operations of the journal and in 1968 gave the journal the name Soundings. With that final change, the journal went from a publication focused exclusively on Christian education and theology to one that is now interdisciplinary and concerned broadly with deep reflection on human value and expression. Long before interdisciplinary work became fashionable in the academy, Soundings was publishing innovative articles that crossed boundaries between literature and theology, philosophy and economics, physics and history, and other fields.

With volume 100, the journal marks an important milestone in its history, but also recommits itself to the ongoing transformation of higher education—a transformation that has liberated countless scholars from the confines of disciplinary silos that make up the basic structure of so many colleges and universities. Very little of the reality around us fits neatly into academic disciplinary boxes. Yet the academy continues to train specialists in narrow fields of study who are unable to put their scholarship into a broader context or see how other disciplines can help them to re-think basic assumptions in their work. Fortunately, many scholars today—especially younger ones—are venturing out of their disciplinary silos. The contemporary university campus has an increasing number of interdisciplinary programs staffed by faculty from a diverse set of disciplines. And students are gravitating to such interdisciplinary programs focusing on geographical areas (e.g., Asian Studies), the study of culture (e.g., Popular Culture Studies or African American Studies), current global issues (e.g., programs on environmentalism and/or sustainability), and much more.

The changes occurring on our campuses do not mean the end of disciplines or the end of the need to train historians, geologists, literary critics, etc. What these changes do mean, however, is that doctoral programs and universities need to push their faculty and their structures beyond the static disciplinary models of the past. The academy still needs to produce literary critics, but they need to be familiar with sociology, psychology, economics, or any number of other fields of study. Colleges still can have students major in English, but they need to be more attentive and dedicated to a broad liberal education that prepares students for a fully integrated and networked future. Indeed, many English departments across the country already are reflecting these changes toward more interdisciplinary collaboration and structures.

In providing a venue for articles from multiple disciplines and that bridge disciplinary divides, Soundings will continue to be at the forefront of the changes occurring in higher education. Indeed, it plays just as important a role today as it did nearly 50 years ago when it took on its current mission. In 1968, in introducing the transition from The Christian Scholar to Soundings, editor Sallie TeSelle wrote that Soundings “will be concerned as was its predecessor with the engagement of the scholar with issues of value, meaning, and purpose which shape the minds of men [sic] in the contemporary world.”² For the last fifty years, Soundings has followed this mission and published some of the leading voices in the academy. Given its history, it is no surprise that Soundings has been a publishing forum for some of the most important theological voices in the last half century—including Michael Novak, James Gustafson, Rosemary Radford Ruether, James Gustafson, John Caputo, Thomas Altizer, Stanley Hauerwas, John Cobb, Harvey Cox, and Langdon Gilkey. Similarly, incredibly important scholars of religion have published in the journal, such as Martin Marty, Ian Barbour, Charles Long, Ninian Smart, David Chidester, and Jonathan Z. Smith. But it has also featured...