Welcome to Saeculum's Inaugural Issue
From the Editor’s Desk
The real work of putting together an undergraduate academic journal for the study of Christianity and Culture began in the summer of 2005 as an idea to create a forum where students of the Christianity and Culture program would be able to share their thoughts, ideas and arguments not just with those in their class, but wit
h the broader program community. It has been an enormously rewarding and interesting project that gained more and more momentum as our editorial board took shape and our on-line version became available. We are eternally indebted to the generosity and encouragement of the University of St. Michael’s College, the Rabanus Project, and the faculty of the Christianity and Culture program. I can only hope that the journal continues to expand in the future.
In this issue, we have tried to present a sampling of student works from each of the four streams of the program— Christianity, Arts and Letters; Christianity and the Intellectual Tradition; Christianity and Science; and Christianity and Society. The student works chosen to represent each stream were carefully selected to showcase the various ways of exploring the interaction between Christianity and culture. In the pieces, our readers are asked to follow the changing portrayals of Christ through Late Antiquity, discover how the Franciscans adopted Merlin as a prophetic authority, explore the end of days with Augustine and hypothesize about the possibility of dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Canadian government regarding stem cell research. We have also included in this issue two pieces that were not written by students, but will surely complement their work. Dr. Brian Walsh offers an overview of the study of Christianity as a cultural phenomenon and Fr. Guy Trudel offers some insight into the Christian imagination of author J.R.R Tolken in The Lord of the Rings. This full version of his paper is available on-line.
This sample is meant to demonstrate the great diversity possible not only in the Christianity and Culture program but also in the study of Christianity in general. Welcome to the inaugural issue of Saeculum. We hope you enjoy.
Annamaria Enenajor
Editor-in-Chief
2005-2006