The Wayhas never, in its fifty-year history, been simply an academic journal. Neither has it been simply pastoral. It has rather tried to maintain its position on the ground where these two meet. This October issue of The Way is the last of those marking the journal’s golden jubilee. This year has offered a chance to look back over five decades during which the world and the Church have both undergone huge changes. A number of the articles in this issue ask whether and how traditional practices and ways of understanding can still foster faith in such different times. The invitation to follow a Christian call today will not be exactly the same as it was when The Way was first published in the early 1960s. No doubt, if the journal survives the coming decades, the nature of that call will have changed again. Yet is clear that any adequate response will continue to touch both head and heart, intellect and affect, academic reflection and personal experience. As it moves into its second half-century, this journal will continue to aim for the middle ground in which these different aspects of the human journey, and of the Christian vocation, meet and influence each other.
Adolfo Nicolás, ‘Interreligious Dialogue: The Experience of some Pioneer Jesuits in Asia’, 7–33
Before becoming Superior General of the Jesuits in 2008, Adolfo Nicolás worked for many years in Asia. Here he draws on that experience to argue for the contemporary emergence of a new paradigm for the work of spreading the gospel, that of ‘evangelisation-through-dialogue’. He finds seeds of this in the work of the first Jesuits in that continent, seeds which at the time failed to flourish in an unprepared world.
Bernadette Miles, ‘Ignatian Spirituality, Apostolic Creativity and Leadership in Times of Change’, 35–41
It is often noted that we are living though times in which societies world-wide are undergoing rapid, thoroughgoing, and perhaps unprecedented change. It is natural, in such a situation, for organizations as well as individuals to become cautious and even fearful. Bernadette Miles, director of the Campion Centre of Ignatian Spirituality in Melbourne, Australia, suggests that Ignatian spirituality can help religious organizations maintain their apostolic creativity in challenging times.
Margaret Blackie, ‘Living an Ignatian Vocation’, 43–52
What might it mean to speak of having an ‘Ignatian vocation’, particularly if you believe yourself to be called at the same time to live as a lay-person, beyond the clear structures of religious life? Margaret Blackie, a South African research chemist, shares her thoughts on this topic, distilled over a decade, in the hope that ‘others will dare to think of their lives in similar terms’.
Juan Miguel Marín, ‘On Confusion and On Prayer: Saint Francisco Borja’, 53–63
Francisco Borja was the third Superior General of the Jesuits, and is often remembered as the man who reined in some of the freedom which had been Ignatius’ legacy to his new kind of religious order. There was much more to him than this, however. Here Juan Miguel Marin presents some of his writing on prayer.
Ian Tomlinson, ‘The Contemplation to Attain Love’, 65–76
The Ignatian Exercises culminate in a prayer form often known by the first word of its Latin title, the Contemplatio. Here Ian Tomlinson, former director of the Loyola Hall Spirituality Centre on Merseyside in England, asks whether this is best regarded as simply another method of prayer, to join the many taught in the Exercises; or more fundamentally as an introduction to a new and more radical way of living.
Santiago Arzubialde, ‘The Development of the Exercises: Recognising the Spirit’, 77–96
Santiago Arzubialde is the author of a 1000–page, two-volume historical analysis of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, written in Spanish. In this extract, translated by Joseph Munitiz SJ, he presents the background to one of the themes for which Ignatius is best known, that of discernment.
Virginia Varley, ‘Fostering the Process of Discerning Together’, 97–112
We come to the last of the reprinted articles marking five decades of publication of The Way. In this one, dating from 1996, Virginia Varley, who worked in two Ignatian spirituality apostolates in Guelph, Canada, presents a series of strategies designed to facilitate the interpersonal attempt to recognise more fully the work of God’s Spirit in the world that is communal discernment.
Gerald O’Mahony, ‘A Bridge Too Far: Exercises 50 and 52’, 113–120
The book of Genesis portrays human beings as having been given dominion over the whole world and everything in it by the creator God. Some have seen this as justifying complicity in the misuse of natural resources and the destruction of the environment. Nathan Stone issues a call for a very different understanding of the relationship we need to have with the created order.
Ingvild Røsok, ‘Unconditional Surrender and Love: How Spirituality Illuminates the Theology of Karl Rahner’, 121–132
The New Testament letter to the Philippians portrays a Christ who, out of unconditional love for humanity, humbled himself to the extent of enduring the ignominious death of a common criminal. Ingvild Røsok here traces the link between this self-humbling, or kenosis, and love as it is investigated in the work of Karl Rahner, one of the great Jesuit theologians of the twentieth century.