Fifty years ago this month The Way was published for the first time. Although Pope John XXIII had already announced his intention to hold the ecumenical council that would come to be known as Vatican II, as yet it neither had been summoned nor had met. The rediscovery of Ignatian spirituality that would be such a feature of the following two decades was foreseen by few. January 1961 was the month that John F. Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States, and it was a few months before the construction of the Berlin Wall, that potent symbol of Cold War divisions. It was, as the cliché has it, a different world. Jump forward fifty years, and nowadays The Way believes itself to be providing ‘a forum in which thoughtful Christians, from different walks of life and different traditions, can reflect on God’s continuing action in human experience’. A broader, more ecumenical, readership is addressed by a wider range of writers—it was not until the twelfth issue of The Way that you find an article written by a woman; and indeed the first non-clerical contribution was sufficiently novel to be entitled simply ‘A Layman’s Point of View’. An emphasis on experience has replaced a predominantly biblical or patristic outlook. But the desire to identify and reflect upon God’s action in the present historical moment has not changed. It is this that has always held the journal securely within the tradition of Ignatian spirituality, even when, as in this number, it offers contributions with different roots.
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