The Dialogue Has Barely Begun

A look backward is also a look ahead.

People have been kind enough to say that keeping Cross Currents alive all those years since 1950 was an achievement, but looking back at its beginnings offers as many reasons for embarrassment as for satisfaction. Although my colleagues and I were united in wishing to emerge from the Roman Catholic cultural ghetto of our childhood, we hardly realized how narrow our world still remained. If, almost by instinct, the journal was ecumenical from the beginning, what was perceived as healthy openness was often the result of fortuitous discoveries and the immediate lessons of World War II.

As a GI student in Paris after that war, I remember encountering Dieu Vivant, a review founded by P[grave{e}]re (later Cardinal) Jean Dani[acute{e}]lou, and struggling through an issue with articles by Karl Barth, Martin Buber, and Nicolas Berdyaev, as well as Dani[acute{e}]lou himself. It did not take me long to understand that these eminent thinkers, although inhabiting different religious worlds, were most often raising parallel questions; I had to familiarize myself with new vocabularies, but it was clear they all had something to say to me.

Interreligious collaboration had a poignantly dramatic meaning to me as a member of Patton's 3rd Army, stumbling across a Nazi concentration camp in the Spring of 1945 where an emaciated survivor greeted me with the cry "Shalom." In view of the large-scale failure of organized Christendom in the face of Hitler's murderous fury against the Jews, it was hardly accidental that the most credible voices for a quarterly that hoped "to explore the implications of Christianity for our times" were representatives of the intellectual/spiritual resistance against Nazism. I would not have been able to explain the theological meaning of religious pluralism, but could easily understand why members of the French resistance did not submit comrades to denominational tests before setting out to destroy a railroad bridge over which the Germans were bringing supplies.

Although my colleagues and I felt an instinctive support for the desire of former colonies to throw off their chains, the journal we produced still reflected a European-centered world. I can remember meeting Vietnamese students in a Parisian caf[acute{e}] during the summer of 1945, young Marxists who knew Jefferson and the U.S. constitution better than I did and hoped to return to Indo-China to help create an independent nation. I did not believe that France would employ military force to retain control over their colony, and was supremely confident in assuring these students that the U.S. would support their cause because of our dedication to the principle of self-determination.

Such memories make it clear that for me--and also, I believe, for my fellow-editors--sustaining Cross Currents over the years was away of continuing our education in public. Although we were fortunate that there were well-educated and independent women involved in planning the journal and serving on the editorial board, none of us could yet foresee the immense and ongoing importance of the women's movement. Of course, the still-limited possibilities for women's higher education meant that the production of women scholars had not yet reached a critical mass, but it is humbling to recognize that there were only three women writers published in the first decade of Cross Currents -- Simone Weil, the German biographer Ida Frederike Goerres, and the Polish philosopher Anna Morawska. (To his credit, the late Erwin Geissman, an active editor from the start, translated the preface of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex prior to its U.S. publication. Unfortunately, the U.S. publisher refused permission for us to use i t as a separate essay and alert our audience to what was coming.)

It should be emphasized that none of the original editors of Cross Currents was a theologian or cleric; we had no intention of creating a journal for specialists in religion. At the same time, we believed that aspiring Christian intellectuals in any field should be theologically informed. This meant that a given issue might contain both Yves Congar on true and false reform in the church and a sociologist's analysis of racism; Andr[acute{e}] N[acute{e}]her on the messiah of Israel and recommendations for moving "from the economics of avarice to an economy for mankind"; Simone Weil's "Beyond Personalism" and a study of African colonialism; Martin Buber on the education of character and Romano Guardini on Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor; Karl Barth's insistence (at the height of the McCarthy period) that the church should be identified with neither the West nor the East, along with an essay on Christian conscience in the face of war. Fortunately, we were correct in assuming that the concerns of our readers were a s wide as those of my co-editors.

There were a growing number of U.S. contributors during the 1960s, and increased interest in Latin America and liberation theology in the 70s, but despite important articles from a range of Jewish scholars, prior to 1990 when it became "the Journal of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life," Cross Currents reflected a basically Christian ecumenism. After that point there was not only a significant Jewish presence, but the board supported the editors' increased efforts to include Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist writers. But there are no grounds for complacency -- the dialogue to which the journal is dedicated has barely begun.