Second Opinion has a history. It also has an historian editor. Readers of the new Second Opinion, therefore, might be wary: will this issue, will subsequent issues, be devoted to backward looks to the earlier version at the expense of the future? The answer is: no.

The managing editor, Dan Perreten, the staff, and I agreed that I should put everything that we have to say about the past and transition to the present in the opening words of this opening issue and then be done with it.

The past: from 1986 to 1995 the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics published a journal called Second Opinion. Its design, articles, and overall achievement were in the "prize-winner" category—we even have some plaques and certificates recognizing this adorning our walls. Devoted readers and critics then and now sometimes refer to some of its issues as "classic." The journal was the flagship, the trademark venture, of the fledgling Park Ridge Center, and is remembered as such by those who knew it and who came to know the Center through it.

For a variety of reasons too complicated to go into here, but none of them having to do with negative judgments about the journal, we decided in 1995 to direct our publishing efforts elsewhere for a time. Now, 4 years later, we welcome the second coming of Second Opinion. Of course, we will continue the Bulletin, which everyone who gets Second Opinion will continue to receive. It allows for a more kinetic, informal treatment of subjects dear to our hearts and noteworthy for our readers. Our researchers, conferees, fellows, visitors, and contracted consultants will continue to produce and publish position papers, proceedings, pamphlets and booklets, and books, as they have been doing with remarkable regularity.

Second Opinion, however, allows us to present consistent updates on areas of concern to us and you, scholarly refereed articles, in an attempt to bring clarity and focus to themes at the juncture of "health, faith, and ethics." As the issues proceed, we intend to acquaint readers with the outcome of research at the Center and glimpses of work in progress. At the same time we are also soliciting and assigning articles and welcome submissions from experts in the disciplines and vocations to which the Center gives impetus and encouragement.

In the future, this column will comment on issues of the day or themes in the current issue. So this is my one moment for the backward look—but with nothing but a forward intent. Here is a second opinion on Second Opinion, a reflection of and a reflecting upon my opening article for the first series of this journal.

First off, we wanted and want to keep tense the relationships between "health, faith, and ethics," as everyone connected with the Park Ridge Center is commissioned to do. Back then I wrote: "In matters of health, life or death may be at stake. In matters of faith, belief or doubt are at issue. In matters of ethics, good or evil actions can result," so a single opinion is rarely sufficient. "In all three cases, a conflict of opinion can inspire panic or probing." We vote for probing. On my office wall is a framed work of Chinese calligraphy that once hung on the wall of Dr. Charles Huggins, the Nobel prize-winning father of chemotherapy. There are several ways to translate it, but the one he cherished is: "Discovery is our business." In the first Second Opinion I quoted Norwood Russell Hanson: "Discovery is what science is all about." There is a scientific dimension to all Center endeavors because we are attentive to medicine and hence to medical science.

Faith, of course, relates to traditions, to communities that are inspired by stories and that inspire stories. Most of these stories come from the long ago, often from the very long ago, and are received as sacred scriptures in the many religious traditions, all of which are important to us when we probe. For this reason the Center's founders, using the code name "Project X," both to signal that we had ten inquiries in mind and because X stands for the unknown, the to-be-discovered, started off with a multi-volume series of books called "Health and Medicine in the [e.g.] Hindu Tradition." They provide a kind of data bank for medics, religious leaders, and ethicists.

When discovery is our business, however, we do not treat the lore of the past, including that coded in scriptures, as belonging to the past. The Park Ridge Center is not an archive, an antique shop, a museum, or a spot for refugees from the present who favor nostalgia. We use such stories and propositions, sacred though they may be, for ressourcement, to engage in what theologian Karl Rahner called "selective retrieval," for what wisdom in them might inform inquiries now. Needless to say, in the context of sciences, be they medical, theological, or ethical, all such resourcing, retrieving, and projecting will be of a critical character. No one is served by bad faith, gullibility, or protectiveness.

To quote a kind of epigraph that served in my 1986 inaugural essay, "The modern first opinion gave science a monopoly. The second opinion finds science more open to partnerships." This theme still serves us well. But if proposing it thirteen years ago led us to seek cover in defensiveness, we feel less need to be defensive today. Our greatly expanded staff, research program, range of services, and connections with others suggests that partnerships are available in then-unanticipated ways. To put it boldly and baldly: we can't keep up with the opportunities. That's good. The second Second Opinion will not lack subjects to address or talent to address them.

The second epigraph read: "The modern first opinion led religion to retreat. The second opinion finds more confident religion advancing toward partnerships with science and philosophy." Much has happened since we proposed that. Of course, we have a long way to go. In many sectors of science, including medical science, word of the new openness to religion is still barely audible. And not a few religionists, relishing talk about "culture wars," resort to whining instead of engagement. A second sign on my office wall reads: "No Whining." We will seek to advance partnerships in positive ways.

You can see that we were using "modern" as an adjective in 1986 to denote the end of a passing era, what Anthony Giddens calls "late modernity." With that sense of the temporal in mind, we revisit the third epigraph: "The modern first opinion separated philosophical and religious ethics. The second opinion finds openings for new relations." Modern medical ethics, a.k.a. bioethics, was born, among other places, in theological schools. Quickly it developed in universities and hospitals where the language of secular rationality dominated to the point of having near-monopoly. No one to our knowledge, this Center included, has found a language to supplant it. But there are many who have found ways to complement it. Whoever follows conference planners, encyclopedists of bioethics, or reporters can see the emergence of new partnerships that allow for a variety of languages, including those related to faith communities, in our common pursuits of health and well-being or in our interpretations of disease, pain, and suffering.

With a final flourish, quoting opinion from the first Second Opinion, we end our only tour of our past: "The role of faith is so vast in respect to conflict and concord past and present, to ignorance and knowledge, to suppression and discovery, to despair and hope, to ignorance and knowledge; to suppression and discovery, to despair and hope, to "illth" and health, that religious thinkers have begun to find new reasons for promoting a second opinion. The doctors among them will disagree and their casuists will doubt. They will thus express a key element in research, an element in strategies that will promote discovery. Some of what they come up with will find its way to a public through the journal which you are reading. By now it should be clear why it is called Second Opinion."

That's my opinion. Discover the second Second Opinion, and enter into the partnerships.