Children’s spirituality: personal reflections on International Journal of Children’s Spirituality (IJCS)

Abstract

As quite many journals under major publishers such as Taylor and Francis are now running in both on-line and print versions, there may be interesting questions on the role of editorials. In a journal where I have been engaged as one of the executive editors, I remembered that in the past I could choose some accepted articles (already appeared online) to make a coherent theme and then write an editorial for an issue. It is quite an interesting but challenging task as it is not written as an editorial for a special issue of a journal. In addition, the journal papers are coming in, often revised and then accepted sporadically and sometimes unpredictably in terms of time and responses of authors, reviewers and editorial board members or associate editors especially the Editor and Book Review Editor who coordinates book reviews. Rust (2018) quoted Purmalo and highlighted the importance of editorials to focus on issues that are crafted to ‘provoke conversation rather than to represent a specific viewpoint’ (p. 600). Moreover, she also indicated the function of honouring the scholarly contributions of these authors and the reviewers who spent time providing feedback and considering the papers as appropriate for publication in journals. Looking back to my first year of editorship of International Journal of Children’s Spirituality (IJCS) in 2020, I would sincerely thank all old and new editorial board members, Dr Tony Eaude (Book Review Editor), Ms Abi Amey (Portfolio Manager), members of College of Reviewers and other reviewers for their hard work and valuable contributions. In my past editorials, I have not quoted and cited the papers just accepted and published for an issue of IJCS partly because these papers altogether might not be very coherent in terms of concepts, themes or methodologies while individually they have made remarkable contributions and useful discourses to the literature of children’s spirituality. It is also part of the reason that I would like to get acquainted to the ‘protocols’ of the IJCS’s editorial system as well as the ‘culture’ of the editorial process. Under this backdrop, my editorials tend to refer to the works of some editorial board members as well as some of the possibly interesting educational issues related to children’s spirituality as my academic background is more from curriculum and educational studies (Lee 2020a, 2020b). In this editorial, I would like to take a snapshot of some of the figures of IJCS between 2009 and 2019 and offer some of my preliminary observations of the published papers in volume 25 (2020). INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHILDREN’S SPIRITUALITY 2021, VOL. 26, NOS. 1–2, 1–8 https://doi.org/10.1080/1364436X.2021.1879504