I had come to the conclusion that the “Letter from the Editor” was not especially useful. Issues of Ecumenica are not large. Except in the case of a special issue that calls for an articulation of an organizational premise, it seemed to me that an editor's preface to and/or summary of the material in a given issue could be overdoing it. But a letter of some sort seemed necessary here, not to comment on the scholarship that follows, but to express the journal's commitments at a moment in which it may be impossible to overdo the expression of such commitments.
Late in 2019, the Parliament of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act or CAA. The act expedited Indian citizenship for refugees who had arrived in India prior to December 2014, fleeing what could be characterized as religious persecution in specific countries that border India. The CAA thus offered a privileged...