Andrew Cohen

Bio & resources

One of the most rewarding aspects of working on this magazine over the years has been the enormous thrill of being immersed in an unending inquiry. The creation of each issue is a collective endeavor that always boils down to my partners in crime and I sitting in a circle and simply losing ourselves in passionate discussion and debate that can end up going in any direction imaginable. What makes all the hard work and stress worth it are the moments of creative synergy or “flow” that we have by now almost come to expect. For a long time, I’ve been calling this our “mind-meld.” The fundamental ground rule for our work together is that this collective dynamic of ongoing edge-pushing and intersubjective inquiry must be constantly kept alive. Whenever it seems that we’ve all gotten too lost in our own particular parts of this process, I always bring us back together to make sure we are together!

An ongoing subject of our discussions has been the traditional notion of the human soul and its relevance in postmodern life. What part of the self is the soul, how does it develop, and where does it come from? This thread has inevitably led us again and again to the fascinating subject of reincarnation and what’s technically known as “survival of bodily death.” Senior editor Carter Phipps, who has been, ever since I met him about fourteen years ago, more fascinated by the esoteric dimensions of spirituality than the rest of us, was the natural candidate to take on this enormous and mysterious field. He became so intrigued by the realms beyond bodily existence he was learning about in his research that he boldly declared he needed to write not one but two feature pieces in order to do the subject justice! After a fierce wrestling match, he finally conceded to write only one but has not ceased to remind us that “there is much more to survival research than reincarnation. There’s out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, communication with mediums, the appearance of apparitions . . .” Okay, okay, okay—one step at a time!

If you think survival research is a little too far out there, wait till you get to Ross Robertson’s feature, “Do Animals Have Souls?” He’ll tell you stories that will surely take your breath away and cause you to question the very meaning of the word soul. To bring this all back to earth, I had a lively, engaging, and uplifting conversation with my friends Reverend Michael Beckwith and his wife, soul singer Rickie Byars-Beckwith, about the intriguing question, “What does it mean to have soul?” And just to make sure none of us forgets the ultimate purpose of this kind of inquiry in this life, our “Beyond Limits” section features a moving piece by Maura O’Connor on the life and work of a rare soul indeed: living saint Mother Antonia.

Nothing we’ve ever published has generated more mail or caused more of a stir than Elizabeth Debold’s ongoing series, “Where Are the Women?” I can’t tell you how gratifying this is for Elizabeth and all of us, as the questions she raises have been a recurring and significant topic within our mind-meld for many years. Indeed, I first met Elizabeth when we interviewed her, as a prominent feminist and author, for our issue on “Women, Enlightenment, and the Divine Mother” almost ten years ago. Since then, she and I have had countless conversations about gender and spirituality, including our first published dialogue, “Liberation Without a Face,” back in 1999. Her current series, of which Part Three is featured in this issue, has led to a recent lecture series, which by all indications may even ignite a revolution through inspiring women to think in radical new ways about women’s spirituality and women’s liberation.

Finally, speaking of our collective mind-meld, longtime editor Craig Hamilton recently decided to “leave the nest,” as he put it, to pursue his own work in the fields of consciousness studies and media. We wish him well and look forward to seeing how all the individual and collective soul development he shared with us will bloom in his future career.