Editorial: ACROSS BOUNDARIES

This issue of DreamSeeker Magazine crosses boundaries of faith, cultural, national, worldview understandings, and more. Article after article invites us to think about what is Other than our selves, circumstances, preferences, current arrangements. 

Dorothy Yoder Nyce invites us to dream of a melting of the ice that in freezing our faith commitments  prevents our grasping the value of other understandings. Titus Bender wants us to grasp that the view from “I” we so regularly champion in North America must give way to “We” lest we perish.

Annie Wenger-Nabigon asks us to feel our way through what happens when a member of an oppressing people marries a member of those oppressed. Brenda Hartman-Souder invites us to join her in Nigeria where faith like Margaret’s helps keep her on course.

Drawing us into pondering the nature of crazy and sane institutions, Alan Soffin helps us consider the possibility that many of the institutions we champion are actually crazy, and institutions other than those we tend to celebrate are the sane ones. Somewhat similarly if focusing over a century earlier, Daniel Hertzler’s reviews of books on the Civil War show us that what looks like sane violence from one perspective can look problematic indeed from another.

Noël R. King’s gives us a fresh angle of vision on ideas, which squirm away to become separate from us, originating with but ending up as other than us. In my column, I hope to show us how even family torment can yield to family transcendence. And the poets help us see across boundaries of seasons and kinds. 

The astute reader may notice that this issue of DSM spans all four quarters of 2012. That is because my commitments as seminary dean are not allowing me enough time to oversee four annual issues. It’s possible that this issue of DSM, as one columnist insightfully suggested I consider, should therefore be declared its finale. Though I don’t rule that out, I’d like to leave space for whatever may happen next, including the possibility that if enough eloquent articles and columns turn up in the next year or so, the time may come to publish a 2013 issue. In the meantime, thanks to readers who have hung in through thick and—as seems currently the case!—thin. —Michael A. King