Our Vision
As a journal of Christian thought at the University of Virginia, Bearings seeks to provide an open forum for spiritual conversation on Grounds. The journal is intended to curate an interdenominational and interdisciplinary conversation characterized by thoughtful cultural engagement. The university is a space for finding one’s "bearings," and so this journal takes seriously the beauty in the very process of understanding the past, questioning the present, pushing towards the future, and bearing with each other by navigating these complicated discussions in faith, hope, and love.
We seek to live out God’s abundant love for the world through intentional exploration of our own lives and the greater communities we inhabit. We hope to create in this journal a space both to reflect on the deeper holiness of life in the midst of a competitive, fast-paced academic culture, and to explore our sense of vocation as students, to see where the world is calling to sow the seeds of reinvention and reexamination to bear the fruit of resurrection life.
Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding.Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance.Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. I ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.Amen.Thomas Aquinas, O.P. (Patron of Scholars)
