Editorial

Abstract

Unfortunately, this is a somewhat delayed issue of Culture and Religion. In January of this year (2019), I had a very close encounter with my mortality – I underwent emergency open-heart surgery for an aortic dissection (a splitting of my aorta), which I only survived due to the excellence of the medical care at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. (For this, I cannot extol highly enough the ‘socialised’ universal medical care system of the Scottish NHS, which makes such life-saving surgery accessible for all.) Needless to say, I am very glad to still be around, and I see everything I do (on both the personal and professional level) in a very different way: from the time of my medical emergency onwards is, quite simply, a bonus. I am still in the process of recovery. So my apologies to all for the delay in the finalisation of this issue. As I write, we are just months away from the journal reaching its twentieth anniversary. When issue 21.1 arrives at some time in the first quarter of 2020, it will be two decades since Culture and Religionwas initially launched (back in early 2000, then as a twice-yearly journal by Curzon Press). There has been a lot of continuity and change since that time, both for the journal and for myself as its editor, as you would expect. But also, the discipline and the field of studies which Culture and Religion serves have also changed and developed, largely in ways which could not have been easily foreseen back in 1999. I intend to address this in more detail in an editorial for the twentieth-anniversary edition, along with a discussion of where I would like to see the journal – and of course the study of religion and culture – to develop over the next two decades (which hopefully I will still be around to see). In anticipation of that, although there has been a lot of excellent scholarship in this time that has been researched, written and published in areas close to the journal’s remit – some of which we have had the pleasure to publish here – I would sum up the situation in 2019/20 as somewhat negative and depressing, particularly in Britain (of course, Brexit notwithstanding). Ten years of public government-led austerity and the introduction of high student fees in England have severely squeezed (that is, largely decimated) the teaching of religious studies in universities (see British Academy 2019), and thus surviving units have had to make do with whatever funds and opportunities they have been able to find. CULTURE AND RELIGION 2019, VOL. 20, NO. 3, 225–230 https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2019.1705030