Vulgata XVII Editorial

The purpose of the arts is to reveal God. Art reveals the Father when it shows forth the beauty of creation. It reveals the Incarnate Son when it shows the sufferings of humanity and calls us to compassion. It reveals the Holy Spirit breathing through creation when it invites us into the realm of imagination, the little sliver of divine creativity that dwells in the heart of the artist.
All too often, art in the modern world reveals only the face of Caliban staring into his mirror. This issue of Vulgata is an attempt to provide an alternative. The stories and poems included here have been chosen because they do not merely allow the reader to escape into an alternate, vaguely more interesting alternative to the reality that we live in, nor do they simply reflect the existential angst of modern man.
This is not to say that these are heart-warming, Christian stories, in which good always triumphs, and everyone goes up to heaven in the arms of the angelic hosts. Such works do little to challenge their audiences, and invite the reader to stay caccooned in a world of banal pious fantasy.
Here, we find the darkness mingled with the light. Carol L. Lanham's "Weeder in God's Garden" shows the struggle of a young man caught between the Charybdis of sexual temptation and the Scylla of Phariseeical condemnation. "Room of Secrets" is a traditional ghost story, mingling human horror with supernatural justice. Ahmed Khan's humerous piece "Synchronicity" is a comic window on the truths that are to be found in the scriptures of the Eastern religions -- a reminder that the Catholic reader has much in common with his Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist neighbours.
The poetry is generally more specifically religious in theme. Joseph's Lisowski gives us a poetic retelling of the Book of Tobit in "Lamentations and Oblations," while T. E. Brady illuminates the David and Bathsheba story in "A Gloss Upon Second Samuel, Chapter 11, In Four Voices."
The result, we hope, is an attempt to be a part of a cultural renewal: the patronage of worthy artistic endeauvers, and an alternative, for the Catholic reader, to the syrupy tales usually found in Christian magazines, and to the moral gut-rot that fills the secular press.