The Fall 2015 issue of The Yale ISM Review is now live!
This issue’s theme of water takes readers to tsunami-afflicted Japan, a Norwegian fjord, the Sonoran desert, the glaciers of Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico. It invites us to step into the hold of slave ships, into mosques and synagogues and churches, and into the River Jordan. It calls us outdoors to pray for rain under a cloudless California sky, and to play and be cleansed with water at a funeral in the Catskill Mountains. It asks us to reflect on how we invite people to the waters of baptism, how we conserve the natural gift of water, and how we celebrate the seasons of creation in the church’s worship.
Water is life-giving, but it can also be a threat to life. This issue is therefore about water as gift and mercy but also as danger and a form of wilderness. Because of the necessity of water for all life, we cannot consider it without also paying due attention to its absence, both real and metaphorical. Water inspires song and plays a role in worship. But it is likewise true that drought, thirst, dryness, aridity—the need for water—call forth a response from creature to Creator, one that must somehow be expressed, whether by means of song, prayer, movement, poetry, or art.
Teresa Berger’s lyrical “A Blessing Over Waters,” opens the issue, and Don Saliers closes it with “Water and the Spirit” — an homage to “the delight God takes in animating human existence and the whole created order by the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.”
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