It's a sleepy Wednesday night and I'm the only one left in the office, on the top floor of CTI's modest Carol Stream, Illinois facilities, across from the Aldi's grocery store and the MacDonalds restaurant. I've been looking through the images on the layouts for this issue—picture after picture of scenes starring Mary, the mother of Jesus—until they have all begun to blur together in one big scene; kind of like Memling's "Seven Joys of Mary" on our opening pages.

And I'm wondering: Do I know the mother of Jesus—the theotokos, or in Jaroslav Pelikan's phrase, "the one who gave birth to the one who is God"—any better now than when we started this issue?

I'm just not sure. Part of me still feels like a kid in a museum: The Renaissance masterpieces, the Byzantine icons, the 15th-century German wood carvings … these are all too lofty and alien—something from a different age and a different religious sensibility. Can all of this really mean anything to me: a college-educated twenty-first century ...

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