From the Editor

It was with joy that we received so many of your letters eagerly welcoming the return of Reflections. As always, we invite your responses to the essays, interviews, and sermons as well as your thoughts on the overall look, structure, and content of the magazine.

We have again featured a single artist’s work to illustrate this edition of Reflections, following the use of Goya etchings and paintings in our previous issue. The current artwork draws from a series of photographic essays and portraits by photographer Gabriel Amadeus Cooney. The photos were taken in places as various as Cuba, Morocco, Italy, Carmel, and, in one case, the Vermont home of Bill Coffin. When I traveled to Cooney’s Northampton studio to view his portfolio, I was immediately struck by how the narrative richness of each photo evoked an expansion and even a meditation on the themes raised in the texts.

Cooney’s work is already familiar to the YDS community. Last spring, we curated a semi-permanent collection of his photographs of the Divinity School’s students, faculty, and campus (indeed, my portrait above and that of our dean on page 2 were taken by Cooney!). If you haven’t already done so, we warmly invite you to visit the Divinity School campus to view Cooney’s work in our Sarah Smith Gallery.

You will also note that Reflections contains a short story, written by alumnus Cliff Spargo. We plan to include short works of fiction in future issues, in addition to a collection of poems. We are especially pleased to have a piece by the distinguished poet Li-Young Lee, who will offer a reading on campus during the spring semester. 

We hope that you enjoy this latest edition of the magazine. We look forward to reading your own reflections on this issue.