Twenty-five Years: Logos and My Catholic Life

Abstract

Twenty-five YearsLogos and My Catholic Life David Paul Deavel Key Words religious conversion, Logos Journal This is the final issue of Logos for which I have served as editor. By the time you are reading this issue, I will have departed from St. Paul, Minnesota, to join the theology department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Leaving the University of St. Thomas for the University of St. Thomas sounds like the verbal equivalent of an M. C. Escher painting or perhaps the plot teaser for a bit of Philip K. Dick fanfiction written by a pious millennial nerd. I am long used to confusions of this sort. The editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies is Adam Deville. Logos, Logos; Deavel, Deville. Confusions aside, I like to think of my move, however, as on one level just an inverted outdoor activity strategy. It’s not quite true, but some people say that everywhere you go, you spend about four months trying to stay indoors as much as possible. In Minnesota that period is the winter, while in Texas it is the summer. The truth is that I am extraordinarily excited about my new position and the possibilities inherent in it. St. Thomas in Houston is a newer (1947) and smaller (about 2,700 undergraduates and 1,300 graduate students), but very dynamic institution. As a member of the theology department, I will have as colleagues Logos contributors [End Page 5] Thomas Harmon, Randy Smith, and Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski. My teaching will be in the graduate theology program, the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston’s St. Mary’s Seminary, and the undergraduate core curriculum. I hope to contribute something to the work of Logos contributors James Matthew Wilson and Joshua Hren, who both joined the university last year to co-found a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program that is “committed expressly to a renewal of the craft of literature within the cosmic scope, long memory, and expansive vision of the Catholic literary and intellectual tradition.”1 There is a lot more to say about my new destination, but this essay is about this journal and my own life as a Catholic, both of which are celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary this year. The saying, often attributed to Albert Einstein, is, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” I cannot help but think that the coincidence of the first issue of Logos being issued in spring of 1997 and my own being received into the Catholic Church almost simultaneously has to do with the mischievously hidden workings of a God whose Providence puts things together in ways that are often not seen till much later. I will not say that my destiny was to pull the Red Pen Excalibur from a rock and preside at the Round Table of Logos editorial meetings, but one of the reasons I have loved every second of my nineteen years working on this journal (the last six as editor-in-chief) is that the vision that animates it—of seeing how the glory of Christ radiates from and illuminates both Catholic culture specifically and all human culture—is a large part of what drew me to Catholic faith specifically. My first recollection of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture came a little more than a year after I had been received into the Catholic Church. In the fall of 1998, I was beginning my second semester of graduate work in theology at Fordham University. That time seems another world in more ways than one. Then the internet was beginning to be useful to scholars but had not quite dominated our reading habits in the way it has now. I still had the habit of (and time for) wandering through the current periodicals section [End Page 6] of the university library and flipping through journals, magazines, and newspapers to see what there was in the wide world to know. After assembling a little stack of materials with articles I wished to read rather than skim, I would plop myself down into a chair, spread out, and feast intellectually for an hour or two...