We are pleased to be back in the saddle here at Transpositions after a luxuriously spent winter intermission. In a way, our return was forestalled for function as much as it was out of mere reverence for leisure. As you can see, we’ve acquired a new look and it is one that we hope will make the breadth of material being presented here more accessible to you week by week.
With a team of writers laboring in the gaps between academic disciplines and sifting through the silos of cultural critique for potential partners, our content warrants a degree of intellectual maneuverability as well as a platform that provides our reader with the same. While the advent of Science Fiction helped make any neat division between the sciences and humanities a patent anachronism, the temptation remains to barricade ourselves within our specialties and so assume the world is separable by degrees and fields.
Far from immune from this isolationist tendency are those writing within Theology—perhaps the only field whose practitioners (at least those who confess to believe in their subject) commence their studies with an awareness to the limits of reason and conclude their work by admitting the ultimately speculative nature of their enterprise. Yet even with humility as our clambering safeguard, theologians far too often find themselves speaking against the panoply of cultural discourse rather than listening attentively for that Divine whisper which undergirds all dialogue.
It is this desire for an attentive and theologically engaged dialogue with culture in general and the arts in particular that Transpositions seeks to foster. Far from bracketing the content of culture into that which illustratively depicts dogma and that which despoils, we instead hope to maintain a receptive and responsive posture that is capable of perceiving the still-moving presence of the Divine across and amidst all disciplines.
And so this year we will continue providing original work from established and upcoming scholars in addition to featuring practicing artists who are equally interested in participating in the conversation surrounding theology in its cultural and aesthetic context today. My own role will continue to be one of mere gratefulness and a befuddled glee to be a part of it at all.
Onward and Upward,
Denny Kinlaw
