Editors' Foreword

Abstract

Editors' Foreword Mark G. Brett and Susan E. Hylen This issue of JBL was produced under extraordinary circumstances. The world was in lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and each day we woke to news of rising infection rates and death tolls around the globe. There have been significant variations among the international reports, although a relentless unveiling of inequalities has been typical in many different contexts. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the infection statistics are disproportionately high; in Vietnam and Kerala, remarkably low. Remote Aboriginal communities in Australia have so far been spared, in part because their leaders saw the potential dangers very early and exhorted people to retreat to their traditional lands away from the centers of industry. Because Aboriginal people have suffered from imported diseases many times in the past, the communal memory was sensitized to the signs of danger.1 Amid these very pressing global concerns, academic journals have reported a dramatic fall in the number of submissions written by women. But as Gale Yee made clear in her Presidential Address to the Society of Biblical Literature last year, there are many other intersectional factors that need to be considered: race, color, and class would need to be added to our statistics before the dynamics of inequality could be understood in all their layered complexity. And even if some institutions in the United States can celebrate the participation of nonwhite faculty, there are researchers from universities in many other parts of the world who have never contributed to JBL. Most of us will be all too aware that patterns of inequality have steadily increased since the 1980s, and even the dismal science of economics has managed to produce bestsellers on the theme. Most recently, in Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty has delivered a one-thousand-page challenge to all of us who worry about [End Page 231] the problems generated by inequality in education.2 That book was written before the coronavirus pandemic, so there is already a new genre of revelation upon us. In the September issue of JBL this year, we are aiming to provide a forum on the topic "Biblical Studies in a Pandemic," and an international group of scholars has been asked to offer their brief reflections. We hope that this will just be one example of a lively debate in years to come. [End Page 232] Footnotes 1. Amy McQuire, "Aboriginal Community Health's Success with Covid-19," The Saturday Paper 298 (2020), https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/health/2020/04/25/aboriginal-community-healths-success-with-covid-19/15877368009740. 2. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2020). Copyright © 2020 Society of Biblical Literature