Fermentations Online is Here!

After many long delays and fruitless vigils, the new web platform of Fermentations magazine is online!  We still have lots of work to do on architecture, styling, and content, but the basic structure and a couple dozen of our most recently published articles are there now, so please feel free to go rummage around, and check back frequently for updates!

Featuring articles by Peter Leithart, Doug Jones, Wesley Hill, and a crew of exciting young writers, and interviews with writers like Stanley Hauerwas and Eric Stoddart, Fermentations seeks to provide thoughtful and creative reflections on the intersection of theology and culture.  With the new website, soon you will be able to read all of our old articles, recipes, poems, short stories, and trademark "Bits of Tid," including some material never before published; and once we get everything running smoothly, you can expect brand-new content on at least a weekly basis.

Fermentations on Technology

At the beginning of this month, Fermentations printed Vol. 2, Issue 2, "Technology," featuring, if I do say so myself, a fascinating interview on theology and surveillance technology that I did last summer with Dr. Eric Stoddart of St. Andrews, and all kinds of other provocative and entertaining explorations of the subject.  

From the contents page:

"Like a fish in water, we are so surrounded by technology that we are tempted perhaps to take it for granted.  Nearly every fixture of our lives bears man’s stamp, the product of more technologies than we can fathom, some of them as old as the hills.  The few who do pause to reflect on our technological saturation seem prone either to flee in terror from 'those dark satanic mills' or to charge ahead with bravado, confident that we can invent our way over every obstacle.

But neither the posture of diffident nostalgia nor of heedless optimism represent the judicious stance of Christian maturity.  In the following pages, our contributors offer a qualified celebration of technology, exploring how we can harness the power of our inventions without being taken captive by them, whether that be in the sphere of farming, surveillance, or the internet.

And if you get sick of reading about technology, you can stimulate your taste buds with a recipe for mayonnaise, your taste for poesy with an 'Epitaph for a Hurricane,' and your taste for ecclesiastical gossip with an account of the SBC’s diversity blues." 

Watch for upcoming content from the issue (or better yet, subscribe) on our soon-to-be-dramatically-enhanced website.

Fermentations on Discovery

The fourth issue of the magazine I help edit, Fermentations, was printed about a week ago, and is as we speak en route to the four corners of the US.  This latest issue, entitled "Discovery" includes Brad Belschner reflecting on how science really ought to work in "Science in Context," Dr. Peter Leithart reviewing William Pfaff's "Irony of Manifest Destiny," Cat Sentz offering an apologia for video games in "Saving Art with Games," instructions on how to make suet pudding, reflections on the latest shenanigans in the Anglican Communion, the ever-popular Bits of Tid, and much much more.

Here's a particularly intriguing excerpt from the theme article, by Brad Belschner: 

"We must understand organisms within the context we find them—not just biologically, but temporally, as well. Here’s where it gets confusing. Bear with me for a moment. This is not an area many scientists have considered. Just because I did a chemical experiment today, does that mean I can repeat the exact same chemical experiment tomorrow? Well, maybe not. History itself is part of the context. Some observations just don't match up with the Laws of Physics as they're currently understood. I'll give you an eerie example: When chemists synthesize new chemicals (species of chemicals the world has never seen), they often have great difficulty in getting those chemicals to crystallize. They just won't budge. They sit there and remain liquids practically forever. Sometimes it takes years for them to crystallize. But once they do crystallize, they suddenly begin to crystallize in laboratories all over the world, simultaneously. It's as if the chemical needed to “figure out” how to crystallize, and it took a while to get the hang of it. Turanose, an obscure kind of sugar, was considered to be a liquid for decades until it first crystallized in the 1920s. After that, turanose everywhere started crystallizing."

If you want to learn more about Fermentations, check out our (very bare-bones and not even up-to-date, but soon to be completely renovated) website.