Preface

Abstract

Preface This issue marks another move forward for Logos. Our first two were thematic ones containing articles solicited from well-established scholars. With Issue 3, wc began moving toward publishing articles that had not been solicited and had gone through our process of "blind review" for acceptance or refusal. That process was used for nearly all the pieces that appear here; it ensures the journal's standing as a scholarly one, ready and willing to operate by the rigorous standards of the best and most prestigious academic publications. While every publication has (and ought to have) a particular slant, determined in part by the editor's vision and predilections, this review process helps to ensure an appropriate degree of objectivity and openess to new advances and different ways of thinking. It also allows the journal to become one "of record"—of providing access to the ongoing conversation in a discipline or area irrespective of a particular point of view. This makes for healthly scholarship and generally good reading. Logos 1:4 1998 Preface Walker Percy, Southern Wayfarer and Man of Letters We open this issue with two articles on one of the most independent -minded and fascinating writers of our time. Walker Percy never intended to become a philosophical essayist, to convert to Catholicism, and to spend the rest ofhis life writing novels (the first ofwhich won the National BookAward in 1960) on the problems of Christian belief at the end of the twentieth century. He was intent on a career in science, and, thus, after work in chemistry at the University of North Carolina, he entered Columbia's School of Physicians and Surgeons, and upon graduating began a residency in pathology at Bellevue Hospital. Performing an autopsy, he contracted tuberculosis and was sent to upstate New York to convalesce, where he began a course of reading in existentialist novels and philosophy that shook his faith in the ability of science to answer the deepest questions ofhuman existence. He found himselfturning to philosophy, Catholicism, and eventually to novel writing, the art form most particularly able to engage "the Christian fact." John Desmond, the president of the Walker Percy Society of America, provides a fine overview of Percy's philosophical positions , particularly his stance in the realism-nominalism debate. Percy affirmed realism, the beliefin the existence ofreal universale independent of the human mind, and this affirmation provides the necessary foundation for his triadic theory of language and is at the heart of his belief in transcendent reality. Desmond is particularly helpful in elucidating the parable of the castaway that Percy used (indeed expanded into a full-length and delightfully quirky book, Lost in the Cosmos) to legitimate Christian belief. To understand that parable—indeed, to understand Christianity itself—one must distinguish between "a piece of knowledge" and "a piece of news."As important as knowledge is and as much as we benefit from it, it cannot substitute for news, for "its object is 'not the teaching but a Logos teacher,' a single person (Jesus Christ), and it is addressed to the existential situation of the individual hearer." To treat this news as knowledge that can be examined for its "philosophical truths," according to Percy, "ignores the fundamental claim of Christianity, that it is based upon a unique event, God's entrance into history in the person of Jesus Christ, an historical event 'existing here and now in time.'" Percy took this somewhat unusual approach to the problem of religious knowledge because he wanted to avoid traditional theological categories, which, he held, no longer were meaningful for most people, including church-going Christians. Since his death to cancer in 1990, two substantial biographies have been published on Percy. Our second piece reflects on the relative merits of these two accounts and offers an astute critique of the most recent one, Walker Percy:A Life, by Percy's literary executor , Patrick Samway, S.J. Over three pages of acknowledgments indicate how exhaustive was Samway's investigation (it seems he talked to or corresponded with nearly everyone who had some acquaintance with Percy), but as Kathleen Scullin suggests in her essay, a welter of details does not make for a life. The great biographer...