This issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science contains a thematic section on “Information and Reality,” with contributions from the Science and Religion Forum held in Birmingham in May 2022. For an introduction to this section, I refer the reader to the introduction that has been written by guest editor Finley Lawson.
Other Articles
The “Articles” section contains five articles. In the first article, Libby Osgood, an engineering professor and a religious sister, investigates how saints can inspire hope and action in support of the environment; specifically, she applies a “green gaze” to Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys, a seventeenth‐century educator in what would become Montreal. In the second article, Yuanlin Guo provides an intriguing reading of Fengshui as neither science (although it focuses on this world) nor religion (although it is mystical); according to him, Fengshui goes beyond magic and is also “a mystical trade that centers on secular benefits.” In the third article, Tim Lomas and Brendan Case survey humankind's ongoing encounters with celestial phenomena that remain genuinely unknown but are considered deeply significant; they witness a shift from angels to aliens against a contemporary secular background with efforts to “debunk” any of these events. In the fourth article, Margaret Boone Rappaport, Christopher Corbally, and Riccardo Campa extend the concept of “rescue and recovery” from an earthly setting (specifically focusing on international law on the high seas) to extraterrestrial species; they show how a fundamental meaning of this concept can be derived from theological analysis. Finally, in the fifth article, Adam Chin reflects on the aims of typologies in the field of science‐and‐religion and offers a new kind of typology, which categorizes the methods used by scholars in the field.
The issue ends with one book review: Derek Gatherer reviews William Phillips's The Cooperative Neuron: Cellular Foundations of Mental Life.
New Editorial Assistant
Since October 1, 2020, when Deb Van der Molen retired, we have been making use of Wiley's services for copy editing and I myself have volunteered as proofreader (which also often involved quite a bit of retroactive copy editing…). Since this had doubled my investment of time in the journal and that situation was supposed to be temporary, the Joint Publication Board of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science agreed last fall to fund a part‐time Editorial Assistant for me at University College London. I am extremely happy to announce that after an open recruitment, with 56 applicants, we were able to select Sarah Jost, a top‐quality candidate with extensive copy editing experience, most recently at Australian National University. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English and Theatre Arts (summa cum laude) from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, has family links with Chicago (Zygon’s home city), and lives and works in London. I very much look forward to working with her, including during the present transition toward publishing diamond open access with the Open Library of Humanities from January 1, 2024 (please visit zygonjournal.org for our new one‐stop website), and onward.
