Welcome to Nexus

Kind greetings, and welcome to Nexus: Conversations on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, a digital-age journal that amplifies and publishes scholarly dialogue taking place in the Hank Center here at Loyola University Chicago. We are pleased to report that Nexus is achieving what we hoped it would: providing fresh insight and sturdy scholarship in relatively fast, farm to table “turnaround” time. It is a delight to convey a diversity of compelling thought and reflection by high echelon thinkers on topics from across the living tapestry of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.

​

With this issue—our fifth—we realize that we have come a very long way in a short time; and we are on schedule to provide two more much anticipated issues before next fall—our spring issue (reflections on Catholic communication ecologies that we are calling “Media and Messages: Digital Ecologies, AI, and Catholic Realism”) and our summer issue (reflections from a diverse group of bishops, students, scholars, and university leaders who visited Japan last August as “pilgrims of hope” called “Nuclear Legacies: Reflections on War, Peace, and Human Dignity.”) We are most excited by the way Nexus is developing and we thank you for your readership.

 

The issue of Nexus we have before us will transport us to truly core terrain and to the center of Christian mystery: that of God becoming Flesh. Issue editor (and Hank Center Graduate Student Assistant), Julian Sieber saw the stars falling into alignment as we were organizing and supporting a pair of conferences (“Pleasures of Pseudepigraphy” in spring and the annual meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association in August, 2025) while at the same time noting the fast approach of the 60th anniversary of Dei Verbum, the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation promulgated at the Second Vatican Council by Pope Paul VI on November 18, 1965. Julian proposed creating an issue of Nexus devoted looking at this most consequential document with fresh eyes—and the essays collected here do just that. 

​

Dei Verbum, has at its center the core truth that the Church, to invoke our dearly departed Pope Francis is not an “institution but a love story.” The Council Fathers who crafted the text established this kind of orientation early in the document, emphasizing from the outset that the drama and trajectory of Christianity is not so much the human search for God, but the story of God’s unrelenting search for us. Observe this beautiful insight from the first chapter of the document:

​

Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God (see Col. 1;15, 1 Tim. 1:17) out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends (see Ex. 33:11; John 15:14-15) and lives among them (see Bar. 3:38), so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself.

​

Dei Verbum both retrieves and extends the tradition, articulated best in John’s Gospel, that God in Christ is the incarnate, living Word. The Incarnation of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth discloses anew an expression of trinitarian logic―a logic that sees human persons as free players/agents who respond to and participate in the dynamics of an inner-trinitarian dialogue. It is not primarily our words about God, but rather the experience and discernment of God’s Word being spoken to us that brings life. This is decisive as it reminds us to keep a proper posture. Christianity is not something that humans have invented; instead, it is something that we have received as pure gift. Our various responses to both the Word, and, analogically, to other words are immediate, ethical, relational, transformative, and, therefore, profoundly theological acts in nature. The hope with our responses, of course, is that we might all become living words within the Word.

​

The Word met history and translated Himself to us. The contemplation of the axial mystery of God made flesh is cultivated and nurtured by Jesus’ self-interpretation (i.e., his acts and words recorded in the Gospel) and the learned interpretations that have followed (teaching assembled by church councils chief among them). It is our call as believers—and the call of scholars in particular—to contemplate the majesty of such mysteries for this moment and to provide helpful ways for others to imagine, encounter, inhabit, and converse with and about the living Word of God. 

​

And conversation truly is the key. Once upon a time, the chief association with “conversation” (i.e., “conversatio”) was that of culture, which is to say, “a way of life.” To converse—to dialogue properly—was to respond to and build up a way of being. The challenge for us today, in a world characterized more by chatter than conversation, is to retrieve, uplift, and share the beauty and intimacy of authentic conversation—and to realize the invitation and the stakes of authentic dialogue articulated so well in documents like Dei Verbum. To be sure, conversation is an essential component of Nexus; and Julian, along with the team of scholars he has gathered, has given us a great gift. Add to that the first-class design provided by the Loyola alum Caroline Wood (‘23) and we see that Nexus is speaking well in many registers.

​

Please read on by turning first to Julian’s superb issue introduction, “Dei Verbum at 60.” We at the Hank Center thank you for your readership and hope that these essays, provided by gifted scholars, will stimulate insight and engender constructive, life-giving conversation—hope that they might help, in word and sentence, “proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them.”[1]