International Kierkegaard Newsletter 1998

No. 20 . October 1998 ISSN 0108-3104 p. 188

EDITORIAL:

As we begin to move toward the year 2000, there is a milestone ahead to be noted. The Autumn of 1979 saw the first issue of this paper and the end of October 1999 will be the 20th anniversary of its founding. Recently, a friend in Denmark mentioned the paper's format in connection with its future. He commented quite fairly that it had the appearance of a paper published during the Resistance, and in saying this he is quite right. It was, in fact, a Resistance paper, a paper that attempted firstly to resist the economic pressure of life by being a low-budget production, freely available to all who wished to read it. It was a Resistance paper secondly in that it was a deliberate attempt to overcome the problems presented by a phenomenon of the time (closed, exclusive groups within Kierkegaard scholarship), by being wide open to all contributions. As editor, like Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, I had, and still have, no opinion concerning the contributions, 'only the points of view confront each other' (Either/Or I, preface).

Having said this, and in the age of the internet, it is time to move on to new things in order to secure the future of this endeavour. Thus, with this issue will be found a mailing sheet, and I would ask all those who do not have easy access to the internet edition of the IKN or who for any reason also need the paper edition, to fill in the mailing sheet and send it to the editorial address at the end of this issue of the Newsletter. We need to establish how many people still need the paper edition and also to make sure we have correct mailing addresses. Thank you so much for your help in this matter.

Finally, I apologize to all those who have written to me with information and material for the Newsletter. We are desperately understaffed at my institution for the time-being and it will be a long while before I can write a proper acknowledgement. I ask you to bear with me in this, thanking you here for your contributions and friendship, also over the years. It has been a joy to me. (Internet web address: http://www.stolaf.edu/collections/kierkegaard/watkin).