Marist Notebooks 38
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This issue No.30 of Marist Notebooks is the work of a new Patrimony Commission appointed by the General Council for the period 2019-2021. Its leader is now Br Antonio Ramalho. It includes former members (Brs André Lanfrey, Michael Green, Patricio Pino, Colin Chalmers, and Allan De Castro) and new members (Br Vincent de Paul Kouassi – West Africa, Mr Dyogenes P. Araujo – Brazil, and Br Omar Peña – Guatemala). In the production of Marist Notebooks, the team works closely with the Communications Office, headed by Mr Luiz Da Rosa, which provides translations and all the technical work associated with layout and publication.
In publishing issue No.38, the Commission is seeking to continue established practice. At the same time, it directs readers to the other means that exist for dissemination of research and articles. For example, the majority of previous issues of Marist Notebooks can be accessed digitally on the champagnat.org website. Additionally, while this four-language journal is published only once a year, and limits itself necessarily to relatively short articles, the champagnat.org website can host longer works as well as research that has not yet been published or translated. This is already the case for a number of contributions, notably by Brs Antonio MartĂnez EstaĂşn and AndrĂ© Lanfrey.
While such work has the disadvantage of being only in the language of its author, sites offering online translation now allow those who are not fluent in that language to get a basic understanding of the text. These sites are continually getter better. It seems to us, therefore, that this complementarity of modes of dissemination, while still in its infancy, can be refined in the years ahead. The website could serve as a something of a resource bank of research from which Marist Notebooks could publish the contributions deemed to be the most interesting, possibly after some further editing by their authors.
Marist Notebooks No.38 may be seen, therefore, as a transition issue: it marks the transition from one editorial team to another, and foreshadows an expansion of means of dissemination. Unlike some previous issues, it does not focus on a particular theme, even though there is an indirect connection between two articles on the history of the Constitutions. We believe that the major contribution of this issue is the discovery by Mr Eric Perrin of a new letter from Fr Champagnat. This sheds particular light on the environment and the atmosphere in which his work at the Hermitage unfolded in the years 1825-27.