2013-2014 Writer’s Guidelines and Theme Descriptions
What Is Weavings?
Welcome to Weavings, a thematic, quarterly journal. Its mission is to promote informed, committed spiritual growth by providing resources for spiritual leadership and exploring how God’s life and human lives are being woven together in the world. Weavings seeks to thread together some of the unraveled ends of Christian life—personal formation and social transformation, individual renewal and church renewal, prayer and ministry, contemplation and mission, Sunday and Monday.
The spiritual life does not begin with special knowledge and end in flight from the world. Woven throughout the pages of Weavings are convictions about Christian spiritual life that shape the material of the journal – simplicity, authenticity, and inclusiveness.
Simplicity locates the spiritual life where it belongs—in the ordinary events of daily life. Authenticity means, to paraphrase Irenaeus of Lyons, that the glory of God becomes visible in human beings who are fully alive. Finally, inclusiveness implies that there is no issue in the personal, congregational, or political sphere that is without spiritual significance.
Since Weavings is a thematic magazine, we consider freelance work that is written to correspond with our upcoming themes. Please read the Writer’s Guidelines, theme descriptions and due dates carefully before submitting material.
Weavings: A Brief History
In 1984 Rueben P. Job, then World Editor of The Upper Room, initiated conversations on the feasibility of developing a spiritual formation publication with an editorial focus somewhere between a daily devotional magazine and the scholarly journals produced by some Roman Catholic religious orders. In September 1985 John S. Mogabgab (Founding Editor) joined The Upper Room staff and began developing the concept of a thematic, bi-monthly publication that would become Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life. The inaugural September/October 1986 issue of Weavings was sent to some five thousand charter subscribers. Its theme was “A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life.”
The journal is considered to be a significant contemporary resource in the field of Christian spirituality. Noted author Parker Palmer observed: “Weavings has consistently given voice to the kind of Christianity that we most need in our time—passionately committed to the light that is in us, radically open to the diverse ways that the light gets refracted in our world, and unabashed by the fact that light and shadow are always found side by side.”
