Editorial

Intellectually and theologically robust, the March 2022 issue of the Journal contains eight articles and nine book reviews. Three of the eight are in the category Different Tenor, and two of the books are by professors at the Toronto School of Theology (TST). Augmenting the issue’s robust quality is a list of recently produced dissertations at TST.

A decolonial approach to the Christian left is the intention of the opening article. It accomplishes this by tracing its sociohistorical and theological movements, exploring its likely challenges in the future, and inviting it to join in the struggle toward social justice and decolonization. The second article introduces Hauerwas’s understanding of the church as a communal agent to strengthen Angela Son’s concept of the Christian as an agent of joy. The third article brings into focus the idea of the “classic prophetic garb,” suggesting that when mentioned in Old Testament narratives it serves as a prop for action.

The environment and evangelism are the respective themes of the next two articles. One levels its sights on the white pine forest ecosystem’s degradation relative to Indigenous peoples and colonialism. It suggests a dialogical response as a corrective to distorted human attitudes to trees, drawing insights from Buber, Black Elk, Pope Francis, and Lynn White Jr. The other recognizes the growing pluralism of the West as foundational and draws on Bosch and Lonergan to propose a ministry of evangelism that embraces that pluralism.

Performance anxiety as both negative and positive is the focus for one of three articles in A Different Tenor. It relates anxiety both to subjective experience and to the construction of self as unfixed but emerging. Another article argues for intercultural theology as a bridge as opposed to a wall, and thus as not just doing theology, but also a personal task and vocation, and illustrates it through concrete examples. The final article brings into focus the idea that God’s love for religious diversity is part of a divine plan and implies a second kenosis that is constitutive of a theology of religious pluralism associated with the pioneering approach of the Canadian Ignatian theological scholar and educator Ovey Mohammed, S.J.

As for book reviews see, for example, what Don Schweitzer is saying about the Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth, Carl Hughes about Hope in a Secular Age, Jerusha M. Neal about Postcolonial Preaching: Creating a Ripple Effect, or Geoffrey Butler about The First Generation of Pentecostal Voices in Canada, 1907–1925. To cap the nine book reviews is a list of theses produced in the last academic year at the Toronto School of Theology. At the end of this issue is a list of our peer reviewers for the three year period from 2018–2021, a recognition of their contribution to the academic integrity of the Journal.