Mystery has fallen on hard times.

It is the stuff of fantasy, not of reality. To invoke it is an attempt to obfuscate rather than to reveal, to divert attention rather than to focus it. But the Church has always proclaimed that mystery is fundamental to her existence. Christ himself is “the mystery of God,” says St. Paul.

This collection of essays, the inaugural issue of The Bibfeldt Revue, is an attempt to recover mystery as a meaningful category. The mysteries of faith are always available to the Church, and in publishing these essays, we hope to equip the saints to live according to those mysteries. In doing this, we have tried to live up to our name as a Revue. Even an essay with a heavier topic, like Sebastian Grünbaum’s worthy reflection on The Mystery of Evil, can be understood as an exploration of our hope in Christ. That hope is explained well in Rebekah Lukas’s essay. Rebekah teaches us that to acknowledge mystery is to bring forth the possibility of hope and wonder. Indeed, my own essay is only an attempt to describe the philosophy of Christian existentialism as the theology of the “cosmic joke.”

I hope you find John Karolus’s exhortation that the members of Christ’s body trust one another and live in unity both as challenging and practical as I did. Stephen Wagner’s review of Chesterton’s classic mystery novel, The Man Who was Thursday, fits surprisingly well with John’s. In the editing process, I found great joy being able to pair their messages of reconciliation in Christ together.

Lastly, and certainly not least, Adrian Bordeleau’s analysis of Tarkovsky’s Solaris shows that any attempt at creation or of love is only an imitation of the True Creator, who is Love. This Love, who is beyond all understanding, is the mystery that teaches us to live well in history as we continue our participation in eternity.

In Christ,

Hayden Lukas, Editor