EDITORIAL
The View from Outside

Michael A. King

The view from outside. One way or another, that’s what most articles in this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine explore. Renee Gehman starts us off with a view of America from Vietnam and the embarrassed sorrow she experiences as the Nickel Mine and Virginia Tech shootings show the world a gun culture her Vietnamese hosts struggle to understand.

Next comes a view from Africa, as Katelyn King, plunged into the intensities, griefs, and moral ambiguities of the HIV/AIDS crisis, moves back and forth between looking at either Africa or America from the outside. Then I report on visiting her in Africa and experiencing myself as outside it yet so warmly adopted by those in it I can only in turn realize

that even those so far from my normal life also belong in my family’s nest.
Polly Ann Brown movingly draws on the movie “Freedom Writers” to ponder how those outside each other’s lives in such settings as urban schools may learn nevertheless to know and be known. William Dellinger tells of his efforts, in word as well as in deed, through farming, to live outside an oil economy threatening to kill our planet both literally and spiritually.

Though the tone shifts dramatically (typical when Kurt Vonnegut is in view), Kent Davis Sensenig extends Dellinger’s thoughts on living outside Western culture’s corrosive effects. Sensenig ponders how this atheist, an outsider from a Christian vantage point, nevertheless helped Christians stand outside the “normal” world from perspectives that resonated with the Way of Jesus.

Noël R. King helps us view matters nearly from outside reality itself, as she reports slyly and playfully on imaginary friends. Mennonites struggle to reconcile police work with pacifist beliefs; other Christians struggle to make sense of this. Truman Brunk shows how those outside either perspective might together build a new “inside.”

Deborah Good temporarily views her normal, active life in Philadelphia from outside, as she spends a summer seeking and pondering quietness in West Virginia. David Greiser stands outside the standard film review canons to focus less on how “Spiderman 3” works as a movie (it doesn’t always, he says) and more on what can be learned if the film is probed for its implicit, possibly even unconscious, “unmistakable mark of One who cannot, finally, be hidden.”

As wars small and large continue to ravage the world, Daniel Hertzler reviews three books that view war and peace from outside the war tradition. As Hertzler concludes, “Somehow it is worth remembering that in World War II, some fought fires instead of people.” And in their various ways this issue’s poets take us outside ordinary perspectives to view heat, water, fatherhood, and more afresh.
—Michael A. King