Editors engage in dialogue with each other at staff meetings, in hallways, over coffee. They talk about what hits them in the articles they are considering for publication. While editing the articles, they engage in similar dialogue with the authors. Some are literal exchanges that deal with criticisms, questions, or suggestions. Others are interior dialogues, as editors ponder themes and concepts, some of which open the window to new ideas or provide coherence for an issue of their journal.

"Symbolism" is what hit me, quite naturally, in paragraph one of Courtney Campbell's "Religion and Bioethics: Taking Symbolism Seriously." He is still only writing line one of his essay, quoting Huston Smith, when he brings up the contention that "symbolism is the language of religion generally" and "is to religion what numbers are to science." Had he had no more to say than that, this article would have given many readers sustenance for mulling during long walks or chats with colleagues, such as those in our editorial circle here.

Symbolism. So it is a big deal, even central. Without even walking over to the bookshelves I recalled all kinds of provocations relating to the symbolism that Campbell sees neglected, but does not want to continue to see neglected, in bioethics. Relating to an issue Campbell illustrates, the symbolism of the national flag, I thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes's "we live by symbols." Justice Felix Frankfurter cited it in 1940 as he helped forge a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against Jehovah's Witnesses. They could not salute that symbol, the flag, and be true to their faith. So they had to suffer, because "we," who had to be united to fight an impending war, "live by symbols." Let them, Jehovah's Witnesses, suffer and maybe die "by symbols."

Other symbol themes flooded into mind as I read on. How could one possibly rule out symbols from bioethics and from the care of the ill, once these have nudged their way into consciousness? Sociologist Thomas Luckmann, arguing that all sentient humans are never simply secular but always somehow religious, saw necessity in human symbol-making and symbol-transacting; symbols help transcend mere biological being, and make us truly human—and somehow religious.

So through symbols we become more than mechanisms. Do the medics and ethicists—and religionists—always recognize that? Moving on from there to the realm of formal thought, one thinks of philosopher Paul Ricoeur's "the symbol gives rise to thought." That concept was so pregnant that I did have to run over to the shelves. It is the title of the last chapter of his great The Symbolism of Evil. Ricoeur was so happy with the aphorism that he elaborated:

'The symbol gives rise to thought . . .' That sentence, which enchants me, says two things: the symbol gives; but what it gives is occasion for thought, something to think about . . . The symbol gives: a philosophy instructed by myths arises at a certain moment in reflection, and, beyond philosophical reflection, it wishes to answer a certain situation of modern culture.

Read Ricoeur to learn more about that "certain situation," but you will come close to it in the essay by Campbell and others here.

When symbol becomes "merely symbol," as it does in much of modernity, it needs retrieval—something the articles in this issue promote. Literary critic Erich Heller in The Disinherited Mind takes moderns back to late-medieval times, to 1529 to be exact. At a table in Marburg Castle, Martin Luther insisted on the connection between symbol and larger reality: the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper in Christian worship were the body and blood of Christ. Huldreich Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, on the other hand, revealed a modern mentality by pleading, though he did not use the precise term, that the bread and the wine merely represented that body and blood.

Theologian Paul Tillich pondered that kind of theme without reference to Heller when he saw late-modern people struggling to remove "mere" and "merely" from connection with representation and symbol.

Oh, one more: novelist Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic, in one of her letters showed her disdain for some Catholic thinkers who, after the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), sounded Zwinglian—not her term—in relation to the same sacrament. If the bread and the wine merely represented the reality of body and blood, she had her way of sending the whole business off to hell.

Campbell does not get that fired up about the concept. His is a reasoned articulation of the values one can and, he argues, one should associate with symbolism when it is taken seriously.

Here I am, stuck on the first paragraph of the first article in this issue. How is that fair to the other authors or to readers who might be looking for common themes? It may not be fully fair in an equal-time sense, but I would argue that by analogy it is evident in the other pieces as well. It pervades Christine E. Gudorf's inquiry into what makes religious healing in Latin America "rich," when some of our technologically-based medicine is less so. David E. Guinn, who gets to voice his views here in our offices, brings many of them together in a theme familiar to him and, we hope, to others: integrative ethics. He draws his symbolic concern on lines of the quotidian, the ordinary, the everyday—where "we live by symbols," where "the symbol gives rise to thought." And an exchange between Mark Carr and Kelly Edwards, furthering the discussion around her previously published piece "Critiquing Empathy," is laden with symbol talk. It even begins on the most everyday and literal level with Dr. Carr's reference to a bumper sticker that "gives rise to thought" about how physicians care.

If these authors make any part of their common points, we hope readers will take their promptings into clinics, classrooms, and the chambers of their minds, and we will listen for what comes forth.