Editorial

The spring 2019 TJT issue presents eight articles in two bridged clusters and six book reviews. Its perspectival range spans religio-ideological considerations, poetic imagery with respect to salvation, reflections by different cultural voices, engagement with different religious traditions, and epistemological and anthropological ramifications, with reference to seemingly divine inaction and absence.

The lead article makes Pilate's question about truth germane to the conceptual link between ideology and religion, especially with reference to the monotheistic faiths Christianity and Islam. In particular, Muslim greater jihad (the inner spiritual struggle of the self) and Christian saving truth show a striking similarity. Three articles follow to form a distinct cluster with respect to social action. One is on how a theology of apology with respect to First Nations people in Canada might unsettle conventional understanding of liberation theology in a Canadian Roman Catholic context and reshape the understanding of Catholic missions. Another presses the point that the call to be a baptized people of God is a commitment to an ecclesiology that must make room for the plight of the strangers, sojourners, immigrants, and refugees seeking equity and justice. The fourth article in the cluster looks at how the Second Vatican Council was a force, through representation at the council, in making room for the Church to engage non-European cultures and the modern world. In the first council session, 21 per cent of the participants were from outside Europe and North America. And that representation, it is argued, had an enormous influence on the development that followed.

More an interlude than a bridge, the fifth article is thematically on movement toward God—on rediscovering the lost depth of meaning in the work of the early twentieth-century Russian lyrical poet Yesenin. His images create a double vison, a secular enfolding of the religious or an intimating of the homeward journeying of the soul. With another voice of a different religio-cultural tradition (holy fools for Christ's sake), Yesenin is more than art and artistry; for through his imaginist poetics, we gain another perspective on a religious and philosophical synthesis that continues through post-revolutionary Russia.

Three more article cluster under "A Different Tenor." Sober-mindedness as a feature of Christian spirituality is thematized in three monastic discourses from the collection by Theoleptos of Philadelphia, spiritual guide of Gregory Palamas. Another article brings into focus how the historian and non-Muslim scholar Wilfrid Cantwell Smith modelled a compassionate engagement with a non-Christian faith whose tradition is seldom taken up by non-Muslims. The issue closes with an essay reassessing the contributions of African American liberation theologian James H. Cone. It offers a perspective that takes up Cone's theodicy: consideration of how God's seeming absence in black anguish and divine invisibility and inaction in the plight of black people. Added to that is the dismissal of white epistemology to inform black action in the world.

Then come six book reviews. See, for example, what Toronto scholar Brian P. Irwin has to say about D.H. Akenson, Discovering the End of Time, or Daniel Operwall about J. Bher, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel. Read on for reviews that are short yet discerning.