Letter from the Editor
It is hard for me to believe that 2010 is almost at a close. This is the season for thanksgiving, and I am especially aware of the many blessings of Providence this year, not the least of which is good health. There are many others.
I am thankful to be able to present our fifth issue of The Christendom Review. I am grateful to co-editor William Luse and contributing editor Lydia McGrew for their advice and aid in this undertaking. We are all grateful to Todd McKimmey, without whose time and technical expertise this journal could not be published.
The Review continues to be blessed with significant new contributors. Nancie King Mertz is internationally recognized for her paintings of places around the world. The focus of her work in this issue is the streets and landmarks of her native city of Chicago: she paints the large and famous as well as the little things and places that are both singular and universal. We have another budding poet, Millie Jones. Andy Nowicki’s essay on the theological tension and mystery between God’s law to Moses and the children of Israel in the Old Testament and the new covenant of mercy, love, and forgiveness through the Incarnation in the New Testament, is challenging, provocative, and hopeful. Timothy McGrew’s essay on the conversion story of Darwin protégé George John Romanes is an education on the theological virtue of faith in operation in a person who seemed to have lost his belief in traditional Christianity to the ersatz religion of mechanical evolution, finally to embrace it fully again at the end of his life. Beth Impson’essay on novelist John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction reminds this writer of the debt readers owe to the New Critics for teaching that, as John Morefield said in an earlier issue, no theory, however newfangled, is ever a satisfactory replacement for a good close reading of the text, which is why William Mickelberry’s piece on Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Time, and Folly” is so quietly and unpretentiously revealing of that little masterpiece of short fiction.
We hope you enjoy the contents of this issue as much as the editors have enjoyed putting it together for you, our readers.
Richard Barnett