Occasionally, I’ll find #PopeFrancis trending on “X” (formerly Twitter). On one such occasion, the cause of the media spike was Francis’s statement that “those who work systematically and with every means possible to repel migrants” are guilty of “grave sin.”1 To no one’s surprise, given our current political climate, the statement generated angry soundbite commentary. One tweet claimed that other countries had “emptied their jails and mental institutions and sent them on the way to [American flag emoji].” “Illegal immigrants,” complained another user, “did not knock on the door[;] they broke the window and snuck through the backdoor.” Two weeks later, another migrant story spewed out of the ugly underbelly of social media: Haitian immigrants, it was claimed, were eating cats, dogs, and geese in Ohio.

The September issue of the journal is usually available on the first of the month. That date has also come to have particular significance for many of us, but for an entirely different reason. In 2015, Pope Francis designated September 1 as the “World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.”1 Other Western Christian communities had already been celebrating the day with creation-themed prayer, and with Francis’s act, the day has truly gained wide and deep ecumenical purchase. The history of the celebration in Western churches can be traced to Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios’s 1989 invitation to “the entire Christian world,” in which he asked that September 1 be designated a day of “prayers and supplications to the Maker of all, [offered] both as thanksgiving for the great gift of Creation and as petitions for its protection and salvation.”2

Five months after the start of his pontificate, Pope Francis sat down with Antonio Spadaro, SJ for a series of interviews that were later translated and then published simultaneously in sixteen Jesuit journals around the world. The resulting text, along with his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (published three months later), anticipates the leitmotifs that would recur in Francis’s teachings. One of these is the importance of encounter: “We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.”1 Similarly, in Evangelii Gaudium, the pope “invite[s] all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them. . . . No one should think that this invitation is not meant for him or her.”2

As I write this note, two anticipated events in the Catholic world have just occurred: the opening of the 2023 Synod on Synodality in Rome and the publication of Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, his follow-up to Laudato Si’. The two share a theme that Francis sees as fundamental to the human creature and

“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Such was the entreaty that, according to popular lore, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted to Martin Luther King Jr. on August 28, 1963.1 The civil rights leader was two-thirds through the speech he was delivering on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. King had spoken about his dream in other contexts but had not included the idea in his prepared texts for this speech. We can be grateful then that King, responding to Jackson or some other grace-touched inspiration, went off script and spoke words that, though often scorned at the time, have ever since resounded deep in the American soul:
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

One of the concerns that has been raised by both boards of the journal (the Board of Directors and the Board of Editorial Consultants) is that of gender parity (or lack thereof) in the articles it publishes—a problem that is troublingly evident in this issue: only one of the authors is a woman, while the

The news of Pope Emeritus Benedict’s passing arrived as I was completing the editor’s note for this issue. Benedict was a man of the church, known for his life of contemplative prayer, liturgical piety, and scholarly faith. In a different ecclesial context, the 2005 election of this scholar hierarch might have been welcomed widely in

In the discussions that preceded my becoming editor of this journal, I raised the issue of journal “fit”: What are the characteristics that should define articles published in the journal? There was general consensus that even if an article were broadly theological and exhibited top-rate scholarship, it might still not be a good fit for

To be a Jesuit “is to know that one is a sinner, yet called to be a companion of Jesus.” So states Degree 2 of the Thirty-Second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus. Like all core insights of Ignatian spirituality, the statement is equally applicable to the Christian life in general: the Christian is a

As this issue goes to press, the world watches in heart-wrenching dismay the violence being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine, staggering violations of human dignity reported in disturbing textual detail and hauntingly graphic images. Over fifty years after Paul VI’s 1965 exhortation to the United Nations, “No more war, war never again,” Pope Francis

In May 2021, the Vatican announced that the Synod of Bishops (“For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission”), previously scheduled for 2022, would be postponed until October 2023. The delay is partly due to COVID-19, but, as Cardinal Mario Grech, the general secretary for the Synod of Bishops, stated, it also allows the synod

I remember being deeply moved when I first read Karl Rahner’s On Prayer, based on a series of meditations he had given in Munich after World War II. Moved and surprised: I had not associated Rahner’s writings with such power to affect the heart. Rational, persuasive, brilliant, insightful, yes, but not spiritually moving. I shouldn’t have

“One professor from MIT reports a new technology, a ‘book’ made of electronic paper which needs only to be plugged in and charged up with a text downloaded.” So wrote Michael Fahey, SJ, the late editor in chief of Theological Studies, in his December 1997 column. Those electronic pages have long ceased to be a wondrous

The Society of Jesus, along with its institutional partners and Ignatian colleagues, will participate in an “Ignatian Year” from May 20, 2021 through July 31, 2022. The year commemorates the 500th anniversary of the event that began Ignatius’s conversion (his injury via cannonball at the Battle of Pamplona) and is meant to invite participants into

Among the painful lessons of our COVID era is the reminder that however vulnerable sociality may be to the caprice of external forces, it always remains fundamental to our condition. We need relationships: the intimate bonds of friendship and closely-knit communities; the casually-sustained familiarity of good acquaintances; and the unpredictable resonances of quotidian encounters. We

In the course of this past year a tide of ominous and challenging events swept over and through the human family and the planet on which we dwell. Notable among these are: the Covid-19 pandemic, yet to be brought under control and continuing to have severe socio-economic consequences; a contentious US presidential election whose divisive

For more than a decade, a required reading for the undergraduate theology course I have most often taught, “Quests for God, Paths of Revelation,” has been Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, The Plague.1 The novel depicts the deadly unfolding of an epidemic of bubonic plague—the medieval Black Death—that strikes the Algerian port city of Oran, cutting

The initial drafting of this “From the Editor’s Desk” commentary for the current issue of Theological Studies began on January 28, the day on which the Latin Church now commemorates St. Thomas Aquinas. This coincidence is one that, on reflection, I have come to consider of import for the stewardship of this respected journal that, ad interim, has