> CIEL Voices & Visions 2009 - editor's introduction - art - fiction - creative non-fiction - student scholarship - poetry
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CIEL Voices & Visions: A Student Journal Editor’s Introduction 2009 What does it take to change people’s minds? Over the last decade, today’s multi-generational college students have witnessed the power of various forms of aggression—pitiless warfare, heartless financial speculation, and mindless overconsumption—to shape public and private opinion. Still, they flock to institutions of higher learning in record numbers with what appears to be faith in the idea that the pen, the brush, the camera, the musical staff, and, yes, the computer, remain mightier than the sword. This year’s edition of CIEL Voices & Visions reflects that faith in reason and imagination. The artists and writers presented here are seen seizing their moment with the support of innovative institutions that seek to improve the human condition, one student at a time. The paintings, poems, stories, photographs, and papers in this edition do not spring from a coordinated, partisan movement for reform in a particular direction. Instead, each piece is a testament to the desire of these individuals to scrutinize and understand their world so that others might do the same. This is the way, they seem to be saying, to move as many people as possible from mindsets to mindfulness. Because the kind of change we make is far more important than the fact that change occurs. I would like to thank Marie Eaton of the CIEL member institution Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, the editor of Voices and Visions for the last several years, for giving me the opportunity to act as guest editor of this edition while she was on sabbatical. I thank also Danielle Woodman Kehoe of Daemen College for her cheerful webmastery of this journal. To the CIEL campus coordinators I send my appreciation for their efforts to identify and submit top-notch student work. And last, but not least, I am grateful to the students whose work refreshed my hopes for the future by being so resolutely hopeful itself. Nancy Mattina |
