The Hopkins Dialectic is a new journal founded by sophomore Karl Johnson that will discuss the intersection of Christianity with modern issues and subject such as philosophy, science and literature. The journal expects to publish its first issue in April and until then has been working with The Triple Helix to hold discussions on similar topics that students will write about in the journal.
The Editorial Board is pleased that the student body has another publication. We support any student-rooted initiative to spread the written word, and we hope that students will read and engage with The Dialectic like they do with the other existing publications on campus. It takes a lot of work to write, compile and edit a full-scale publication, and we, like many other students, know how demanding Hopkins can be. We commend Johnson and his staff for taking the time to do us all such a service.
We believe that special-interest publications of this type have an important role to play on campus. Religion is just one example of an often misunderstood and demonized entity on college campuses, and The Dialectic is actively fighting head-on the biases students may have with Christianity. The Dialectic, along with other student publications, offers students a platform to engage in difficult or controversial topics.
Hopkins has a lot of student publications, such as the JHU Politik, The Triple Helix, J.Magazine and Thoroughfare, and they all fill a niche. As long as students want to write and want to contribute their thoughts, then all of the publications are necessary. The readership isn’t always most important — what matters is that the forum for expression exists on campus. Even The News-Letter, which has a decent variety of content, cannot support every student who has thoughts to share, and so we’re glad that there are more outlets and more opportunities for students to be heard.
