Greetings From The Editor
Dear Friends,
Year 2019 presented many challenges to our ministry at The Living Pulpit. In the middle of the year, our website crashed, and it took a team of professionals and volunteers to have the site restored to a reasonably operating state. There are still a few remaining tasks that need to be addressed on our web home, but they will be resolved in due course, as well. On top of all that, we lost a few key members of the publishing team. In spite of these great challenges and testing times, we persevere in our ministry. This sharing of a fraction of troubles that we had to go through in 2019 would account for the unusual delay in the publication of this combined issue of COURAGE and SIMPLICITY. The spate of despair that came upon our journal inspires courage in our team, while reminding us of the importance of uncluttered simplicity.
The first theme of COURAGE harkens us back to its Latin root, cor, which means “heart,” as can still be observed in the modern Romance languages. Many ancient people thought of the heart as the seat of emotions and existence. Coming straight from the heart, Maya Angelou counsels us: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
As our readers illustrate from many wonderful resources including the Bible and literature, courage keeps us steady on our course, especially in critical times. We remember the time Pope John Paul II was a gunman’s target of assassination. As the Holy Father was being rushed to hospital, he repeated one Italian word to the rescue workers. Coraggio! Coraggio! Ordinarily, we would expect first-responders to say the word to a wounded person. In the news, however, it was the bleeding victim that was stoking up courage in the people who came to his aid. On that day, Mark Twain found a perfect living illustration of his apothegm on courage: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”
While the editors of TLP originally selected the theme of SIMPLICITY for a separate issue, our readers will find in this issue the serendipitous connection between COURAGE and SIMPLICITY. As Remy the young chef in the 2007 Disney movie Ratatouille discovers, each of rustic ingredients is great, but when they come together in the pot, they generate a flavor that none could by itself. In a comparable manner, both of our subjects call us back to the key elements that constitute the core of our faith walk, while they join their force to be counter-cultural in a way that we could not have imagined. In a world that finds extravagant bravados attractive, it takes COURAGE to go against the grains and welcome SIMPLICITY—as one of our authors puts it, not as a call to sainthood but as the gift of freedom. SIMPLICITY with COURAGE defies the practice of pursuing abundance in a world that tolerates or even sponsors the profit-seeking plunder of nature that God created for the benefit of all beings, human and others, organic and otherwise.
Peace,
Jin H. Han, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
