Editor's Note

In my first two years at Oxford, I (Alvin) lived down Iffley Road, just opposite the University Sports Centre. One of the best things about going back to my room at the end of the day was gazing at the sky above the Sports Centre grounds—unobstructed by any buildings, you could see the sunset fires, the twilight whispers, or the evening glitter, depending on how late you had stayed in the library until.

I am certainly not the only one with such an intense fascination with the sky and its 24-hour lightshow, as evidenced by the innumerable sky photos on Instagram. The multifarious ways in which light from celestial bodies interact with particles and water droplets give rise to a different painting every single time one looks, and indeed they are part of the reason that we can look at anything at all.

There are few things that are simultaneously as ubiquitous and as magical as light. For the visually unimpaired, light is so quotidian that we often forget how it powers our sight, and we take for granted the fact that we can see at night with the help of our manmade lights. But the ways that light reflects, refracts, and diffracts have also inspired wonder in scientists and artists since antiquity. And in fact, most of the chemical energy in most ecosystems comes ultimately from the sun, so indeed it is light that in some sense allows us to live and move and have our being.

The Bible, too, picks up on the theme of light in its description of God and life. Light is the first thing God creates (Gen 1:3), and is one way that He manifests Himself to His people (Exo 13:21). Jesus is the fulfillment of prophecy about the dawning light (Isa 9:2), shines in glory (Matt 17:2), and is called the light of the world (John 8:12). God’s people are called to live as bright lights (Matt 5:14; Eph 5:8; 1 John 1:7), and are promised eternal light in the new creation (Rev 22:5).

There seems to be something to this—a universal recognition of the powerful, essential, beautiful, and radiant nature of light. The metaphorical connection between light and goodness seems intuitive and almost trivial, and the light-versus-dark motif is pervasive in cultures and literatures around the world.

But light is also all-illuminating, and exposes things which we may want to keep hidden in the shadows. It amuses me that one name for the SI unit of luminance is ‘nit’, which reflects how we feel about light sometimes: pesky and unshruggable. The psalmist makes this observation in Psalm 139:

“If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” (Ps 139:11–12 NIV)

That distance between starlight and searchlight is the space explored by our contributors to this issue, creating a kaleidoscope of ideas about lights, whether physical, fictional, conceptual, or metaphorical. It has been an enlightening journey, if you will excuse the pun, and we hope that it will be so for you as well.

Alvin Tan & Telemi Emmanuel-Aina (Editors-in-Chief)