It is a great privilege for me to be able to welcome you to the Sophia Journal online. The Journal is to be a home for work embodying the new and evolving discpline of Spiritual Psychology—a psychology for the age of the conciousness soul, in which the individual begins to meet the spirit in the immediacy of soul life.That such a psychology is developed is critical for our time, as psychologies of a materialistic nature must inevitably fall short in their capacity to hold human beings in the fullness of their spiritual depth and complexity. To that end, the articles in this first online issue reflect a breadth of concerns. There is Robert Sardello’s remarkable exploration of the ironic imagination and it’s relation to service, Cheryl Sanders’ quietly penetrating look at service and it’s relationship to the grail myths. There are the reflections of an anonymous contributor on the intensity of the presence of silence and its mysteries. . . . These and other works in this issue have in common a willingness to suspend epistemological prejudices in the hope of seeing something new, while at the same time putting that new awareness in the service of soul and spirit, the service of Sophia herself. In so doing, the Sophia Journal looks to join its voice with others in the world-at-large, to embody a future that survives its passage through the narrow view of these times and opens into a perspective that leaves more room for us to be in our humanity. Work of this kind must be grounded not only in the past but in the future as it streams toward us, bringing insights unconstricted by current nihilisms, fresh with nascent life and understanding. To do that means finding ways to participate in the world’s becoming that allow us, in Georg Kuhlewhind’s words, to remain “unfinished” –to offer new ways of writing and even new ways of reading the world around us. That is the end to which Sophia is called. Come and join us. . . .

David Hickman