Expositions

Reviewed by: Cheryl LaGuardia, Research Librarian, Widener Library, Harvard University

On the journal website, Expositions is stated to be: “an on-line journal where scholars from multiple disciplines gather as colleagues to converse about common texts and questions in the humanities. Acting on the Augustinian principle that nothing human is foreign to the sympathetic heart, we seek articles, interdisciplinary exchanges, and briefer notes and insights that benefit teaching, research, and the life of the academy.”

If one examines the latest issue, Volume 11, Number 1, 2017, titled, “Ethics in Focus,” one might think it is a theological journal, a law review, or a philosophical forum. The issue’s five articles are: “The Ethics of Cooperation and the Contraceptive Mandate: Legal, Political, and Moral Dimensions,” “Co-operation in the Age of Hobby Lobby: When Sincerity is Not Enough,” “Religious Doctrine and the HHS Mandate,” “Coerced Proximate Contingent Material Cooperation: An Analysis of the HHS Contraceptive Mandate,” and “Presence, Privilege, and Moral Appropriation: Reading Zubik as an Act of Protest.” The journal’s Catholic perspective was made more manifest in the managing editor’s Preface to the previous issue, Volume 10, Number 2, 2016: a Special Issue: Shakespeare Studies at Oxford - Four Interviews, in which he notes, “We always intended for Expositions to be more than a standard academic journal. We have our commitment to interdisciplinary work and to liberal education (particularly Catholic education) itself.” And then I went back to the Volume 9, Number 2, 2015 issue of Encounters to find the articles, “Shame on You: The Virtuous Use of Shame in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” “Sovereign Poetics: from Exception to Apocrypha,” “Saint Louis IX and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III” along with the Perspectives on Analytic Philosophy pieces, “Waiting for the Revolution” and “The Challenge of Teaching Analytic Philosophy to Undergraduates,” followed by a book review of William Theodore De Bary’s The Great Civilized Conversation: Education for World Community. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

So it’s fair to say that in Encounters scholars from multiple disciplines gather as colleagues to converse about common texts and questions in the humanities… that benefit teaching, research, and the life of the academy, but it’s clearer to specify the Catholic academy, since most of the questions examined here will be of greatest interest to Catholic theologians and scholars.