Interview: M. Therese Lysaught and Jason King from the Journal of Moral Theology

Building a Big Tent for Theology in Academic Publishing

This week the newsletter features an interview with M. Therese Lysaught and Jason King, the editor and editor emeritus, respectively, of the Journal of Moral Theology. We discussed how the journal originally filled a niche in the theology publishing world and has expanded in innovative ways while remaining faithful to its mission of providing a “big tent” for conversations about Catholic moral theology. We also talked about the editorial process, “Reviewer Number Two,” and writing tips for authors to improve their manuscripts before submitting them to a journal. The conversation also turned to the pros and cons of open access publishing and the connections between academic publishing and social media.

You can listen to the interview by clicking on the audio file below. The interview is about the length of a typical podcast, and you should be able to listen on your computer or phone. A full transcript of the interview is also published below for your reading convenience, along with some links and notes not available in the audio. (The transcript may be cut off in your email, but you should be able to click where it says “View entire message” to see the rest of the transcript.)

Join the conversation by leaving a Comment below! Also let me know if you had any issues with the audio.

---

Don’t forget to subscribe, if you haven’t already, so you can get more great content like this from Window Light!

MATTHEW SHADLE: So I'm here with Jason King, the editor emeritus of the Journal of Moral Theology, and a professor of theology at Saint Vincent College, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and with Therese Lysaught, the current editor of the Journal of Moral Theology and a professor at Loyola University in Chicago. So you’re at the, I had to look this up, the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Care Leadership, and the Institute for Pastoral Studies, both at Loyola. So thank you for joining me. Today we're going to talk about the Journal of Moral Theology and what it's like to be an editor. So to start us off, let's start with, why was the Journal of Moral Theology established? It was established in 2012, so just over ten years ago. So why was it established? And what need was it trying to fill? And I think we could start with Jason.

JASON KING: I was not part of the founding. I think Bill Mattison, and Dave Cloutier, and David McCarthy were talking, and they were saying, there's no journal for Catholic moral theology. Yeah, the Society of Christian . . . the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Theological Studies that did the Notes,¹ and you know, they would publish some essays . . .

SHADLE: The Journal of Religious Ethics.

KING: Yeah, the Journal of Religious Ethics yeah, those were there, but nothing distinctively Catholic, and so I think they were just talking about it. And then McCarthy, and his McCarthy ways, was like, “I'll do it! I'll start it!” And he just started it, and he just was like, “How do you . . . How do you do this? How do you figure this out?” And, you know, he used these connections to get the first issue done, which was like, I forget what it was called, but it was basically like the people in the field reflecting on their mentors, and so to try to get it off. And then he scheduled out like five years of issues to get it off the ground. He discovered that he wanted to get it indexed on Atla,² and to do that you had to be established for five years. So he scheduled out five years worth of issues, and then appointed, found editors for each of the issues, and tried to get it off the ground and use those first few years to try to get the network of people established. So I think, for him, he saw this filling a niche within this area where Catholics would publish in all sorts of journals, but this would be his place. Although when I talk to him, he said that he was really, there was a lot of good stuff coming out, and he was kind of lazy, so he's trying to create it such that people would send him things that he should really be reading.

*Laughter*

SHADLE: But it is a great story, because there really was this niche that wasn't being filled, and so they took the initiative to do that. Therese, did you have anything to add to that?

M. THERESE LYSAUGHT: No, I mean, I think that sounds right. But I still think there are very few places for people who do Catholic theological ethics or Catholic moral theology to send their stuff, right? So when I have students who have interesting papers, or colleagues, you know, they're like, “Well, where are we going to send it?” And it's a pretty short list, so . . . I think we've opened up a space in the niche, but still a pretty small space.

SHADLE: Okay. And so following up on this, and you both could add to this and go whatever direction you want: How has the journal evolved in the ten plus years since then, aside from getting registered on the Atla . . .

KING: I love this question because I get to use my Max Weber joke, which is the only Max Weber . . . It's not even funny, but it's my Max Weber joke, which is, David McCarthy was this charismatic figure that just did everything and intuited everything, and did everything on the fly, and he had great instincts to do it. And so then I became editor, and my job was the routinization of charisma.

*Laughter*

KING: My job was to build processes and policies and patterns, and predictability to it, so that we had that piece. I was also trying to move it to more open submissions, in a way trying to keep some of the themed editions, because, well . . . So the story behind that, I was at SCE one time trying to hold a board meeting, and there were like five or six of us there. And Stanley Hauerwas walked in. We were like at a Starbucks, and Stanley Hauerwas walked in, ordered a coffee, and he saw all the people and is like, “I know those guys.” And so he sat down, and then he was like, “Wait, this is a board meeting.” And we’re like, “Yeah.” So he's like, “Alright. Keep doing the themed issues.” And that was it.

*Laughter*

SHADLE: That is an interesting point, that's one of the distinguishing features of the journal is that, unlike other journals, there's a substantial number of themed issues. But you're saying that there’s been trying to find more balance between open submissions and themes.

LYSAUGHT: Yeah. Well, I would say that the journal, then, was a little bit like the creation of the universe. There was the Big Bang with, you know, David McCarthy, and then it's just expanded ever since, and all it does is keep expanding. So David started with these themed issues edited by, you know, scholars in the field, and then, I’m not quite sure when this happened, but maybe with your transition, Jason. We ship it over to the schedule that we've tried to follow for the last five years-ish, where our January and July issues are dedicated--hopefully, fingers crossed--to articles that come in via the open submission process, and then the other two, and then we do two special themed, guest-edited issues per year, which has doubled the volume of work, or that was the first doubling of the volume of work. And now we do those themed issues also, you know, we have a call for papers, right? So it's not just like one person conceptualizing an issue, but it's conceptualized and then open to other people who might want to submit in response to that question. So we're trying to follow that rhythm now, with our four issues a year. And then we added the book series, which Jason can talk about, which is the next level of doubling.

KING: Definitely towards the middle, I was flying solo for a little bit, and then Therese came on, and so we overlapped a little bit, which turned out to be wonderful, and between our discussions, trying to differentiate the themed and invited issues from the open issues, and because the masthead was like, “It's double peer reviewed,” and we needed to honor that, and try to differentiate those pieces and be clear on what those were. So that was our attempt to try to preserve January and July as more open issues, and then, or even if they were themed, they were the results of a call with open submissions, and then we would go through those revisions, so try to keep those, preserve those, as open, and then, because there was a value in a lot of these themed issues that would bring together several scholars on something important, they were worth preserving. But then we didn't promise to do any of those, but it definitely seems like about two of them come out a year, regardless of how much we try to slow that down.

LYSAUGHT: Right. We could probably do more a year.

KING: But yes, we have lots of good people doing lots of good things.

LYSAUGHT: Lots of good people doing lots of good things pro bono. So we, you know, have to put some limits on it.

KING: Yeah, I would . . . The other big transition out of two big transitions that Therese and I were both involved in. It was moving to Scholastica as an open platform to make it more widely available. Away from the Mount’s³ library, where it was, there was a repository for it, but just try to make it more broadly available, accessible, downloadable. That was a big deal, and then we incorporated it last year, two years ago. It was recently.

LYSAUGHT: Late 2021?

KING: Because then we had some finances to help cover the cost of Scholastica, and we needed to move that through the corporation as opposed to various institutions. So those shifts that make it stand on its own.

SHADLE: Yeah, we can talk about that last point a bit later, too, because I want to talk about the open access.

LYSAUGHT: But there's two more evolutions. We're only halfway through our evolution, Jason. So then, in 2021, I think, we then entered into this partnership with Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church to publish their Global Theological Ethics Book Series where we thought, oh, we'll do one book a year. Now we're doing two a year, of course, on top of our core issues per year. And Jason could talk a little bit about that. And then I have one more expansion, so I'll turn that over to you.

KING: Yeah. And we can talk about that, the CTEWC books. They were published, but they were having problems getting them . . . They were having access problems to people outside of the US. It was hard to order them in paperback, and they were trying to find a way to be able to pull off essays in particular ones. They still want paper copies, but some places just wanted to be able to download particular essays or download the whole book. And so the platform that we were on offered that, and so it offered them basically open access to their book, but also the possibility of publishing. So that was a big piece that also helped us. It was also part of the reason for incorporation, because they were covering some of the cost for the book production, and so we needed to process that, and we didn't want to have to . . . I might get arrested for a bunch of things, but I'm not going to get arrested for money laundering . . .

LYSAUGHT: Money laundering!

KING: . . . through various institutions. So we needed to clean that up so they could pay the journal directly, which was doing the work for them, as well.

LYSAUGHT: You work on family ethics, not business ethics. That’s what I always tell people.

*Laughter*

KING: So that was, yeah. And then Therese had one more big expansion, which is really, I mean. . . .

LYSAUGHT: So as we kept doing this, you know, first David was pretty much doing all the work with the help of some friends, and then Jason became . . . Did I say, David? Then Jason became the editor, and at a certain point added me as associate editor, and so Jason and I were doing . . .

KING: Everything.

LYSAUGHT: . . . a lot of work with our managing editor and the inimitable Bill Collinge, who is our senior editor, and proofs things for us. But then, when we transitioned over to me as editor, I said, “Well, we're just doing way too much, and we need more hands.” So we expanded our editorial staff, and so now we have our editor emeritus who is doing a lot of work. He oversees our book series, which is really great. Our senior editor, Bill Collinge, still is our senior proofer, and does amazing work. We have four associate editors, who each have a different hat: communications, and operations, and production, and all those kinds of things. So we sort of divvy up the work there, and then our book editors have also just now become associate editors. So it's six. So we have, you know, we have a really big staff, and they just do great work. So that's where we're at now. That's the most recent evolution in our twelve years.

SHADLE: And I think all of that just testifies to the success of the journal, that a lot of these evolutions are expansions and tackling new things. So we've already been touching on it a little bit, but can you tell us more, like, what is the role of a journal editor? And what do you spend your time doing?

KING: Do you want to go first, or do you want me to?

LYSAUGHT: You can start.

KING: I think the main role is just making sure the issue happens, right? And it hits your marks, right, like the January issue comes out in January, July issue comes out in July, and if you're hitting those marks, that's it. And you have to make sure that happens. So you're trying to make sure submissions come in, and I’m always, at any time I go to a panel like at SCE, CTSA,⁴ any time that I hear a good paper, I'm like, “Oh, you should send it in. You should send it in.” Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't. It's usually by the time they're presenting, most of those are really pretty good papers anyways, so trying to get papers in, trying to find reviewers, trying to get reviewers to turn in the reviews, and then trying to make a decision on the reviewers' recommendation. Sometimes you might send it out to another reviewer, just in case, or might make an editorial decision, and then you start to make sure you've got enough issues that are coming in. You're also trying to make sure the book review editors are trying to get . . . that they're coming in, because they've got to contact the publishers to get the books, but also to find reviewers to review the books and to make sure the reviews come in, and then we're compiling all of those pieces. Then, even when you get all the essays, then you're trying to make sure that you got everything that you need. You get enough for an issue. Get it to the managing editor that produces them and formats them. I proof everything, too. But it’s not enough. And then our managing editor for a long time proofed stuff, as well. But then Bill Collinge, who, he’s just a master of this, proofs them as well, and in that process they’ll go back to the authors to make sure that they’re there. So it’s making sure the issue happens, making sure you have enough to put in the issue, and then making sure all the editing, all the polishing, has been done, so we’ve caught all of the errors that we can possibly do, and formatted it so it looks professional, sort of like a journal. A story about Bill is, we had an essay come in. It was on history, so it had these Latin quotes in the footnotes, and he caught juxtaposed letters in the Latin footnote at the bottom of the essay. And we sent it off to the author, and it was like, “Oh, we fixed this one,” and the author was like, “Who is your editor? Who caught that? That is amazing.” And so he’s just phenomenal, right? He could probably catch a period if it was accidentally italicized.

SHADLE: I like your description of the role, to make sure that it looks sort of like a journal.

*Laughter*

LYSAUGHT: He also has memorized the Chicago Manual of Style, which is also very helpful.

SHADLE: That’s what you got to do is, you got to know the rules and have them down.

KING: That’s a headache, making sure all the footnotes are there. So Therese, I don’t know if you have anything to add to that other than going crazy.

LYSAUGHT: I think that’s one reason that we added so many more hands, because there’s so many steps, right, from recruiting, getting an essay, having things come in the pipeline, either by recruiting them or catching them when they come in through the open submission portal, all the way through the review production process, to the final publication. It's a lot of logistics, and it's a lot of pinging people to say, “Just checking in.” And you know, most everybody is very amenable, but we do have to actually give a little couple of shout outs, I mean the proofing process to me is like one of the most mind-bending aspects, because we have . . . now we have Jean-Pierre Fortin who does our first proof, and he does a final proof. And if we're working on the books, Jason and I proof them in addition to Bill, in addition to Aaron Weisel, who is our new editorial assistant. I mean, we have so many people proof this thing. And invariably when I'm posting it to the website, I find more things that we still haven't caught, and I mean it's just, it's really quite a lot of hands go into making it work, and I mean, some people pay outfits to do this, right? So, you know they pay whoever does the Society of Christian Ethics journal. You know, they have some company that does all this work for them. But because we’re open access . . . Aaron just joined us last year as a graduate student, so we feel obliged to pay him. So we pay him a little stipend, which probably doesn't quite cover all the work he does. But everybody else works pro bono, and it's just really amazing to me the great work everybody does, including our book review editors, who I never have to go talk to because they're so far ahead of me. Mari Rapela Heidt and Kate Ward are just like, well, money. They are so good.

*Laughter*

SHADLE: Okay. So a couple of fun questions here. So are the stereotypes about “Reviewer Number 2” true?

KING: I think we each have a story on this one. Do you want to go Therese?

LYSAUGHT: Again, you have more experience on this, because I've only been doing this for a year. It feels like four, but it's only been a year. So you go first.

KING: So this is my theory. The incentives for the editor are to get stuff in, like, I want this issue out. I want essays in, and so I want approval. But I think the incentives for the reviewer are to show, “I did work. I read this,” and that means, “Here's my comments. Here's my criticisms. Here's the things that need to change.” So I think there are incentives, like, I want them to be like, “This is a great article, publish it!” And I'm like, “Oh, that's good!”

LYSAUGHT: Right.

KING: And they're like, “Here's this list of things,” because they want to do good work, right? That's the incentive. So, I think that's it. I think that's most of it, trying to do good work. You will find, occasionally, I don't think it's always true, at least in my experience, but you will find most of the people, their comments are like, “It's not quite there yet, and here's what I would do to fix it.” But occasionally you'll get someone who sees their role as judgment. Judgment Day. “Let me tell you why this is horrible.” And I'm like, “Okay, that's not helping me.”

SHADLE: But I should say for listeners and readers who maybe aren’t familiar, “Reviewer Number 2” is a stereotype in academia that there's always the reviewer who says something cruel or outlandish, or, you know, recommends that you read your own book. You know, that you should have read your own book before you submitted this article, that sort of thing. So Jason, you're saying that there's maybe this incentive, they feel like they need to criticize and make suggestions that leads to that stereotype. So I got to say, I have my own experience of this. This was a long time ago, but I had a reviewer that just sent a one sentence review, and I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was something like, “This is terrible,” like that's all it said.

*Laughter*

Matthew: And then the other review was positive. The other review was “publish this.” And so the editor, because they didn't really have anything to go on from the negative review, ended up publishing it, because, I mean, that just goes to show, I mean, show your work, right? If you don't think it should be published, you need to explain why, because otherwise . . .

KING: When I send out the responses, the way the system works in Scholastica, it moves over the reviewer's comments, and I'll go through and edit them to make sure that they land a little bit more softly. I don't . . . I don’t want . . . There’s no need to be cruel.

LYSAUGHT: Having been on the receiving end of, not too many but a few, and you know, they stick in your mind. You remember them forever, right? Now as an editor, I feel like I have this fiduciary responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen to anybody else. But I’ll say for the, you know, I’ve only been doing this a little over a year now, I mean, on the one hand, and I think you probably did this, too, Jason, I'm pretty careful about who I invite to review. First of all, we've got our editorial board, and they're a bunch of great people. We are a bunch of moral theologians, and so they do actually practice the virtues, which is really nice, you know. And then, when . . . if we need some additional expertise, I try to suss out does that person seem like a reputable scholar, who, you know, seems to have good character. So in my experience, nobody has flamed anybody, which is nice, and everybody, and like you said Jason, people would be very thorough, like people want to say, “I showed up and did my work.” But I have found them to be very generous and charitable, right? You know, everybody always starts out with, “Okay, this is what's great about this article. Da da da da da. And now here's the twenty some things you have to fix, or I would recommend you fix,” and you know, a lot of times when I go through and look at the essay, I'm like, “Yes, those are all really good suggestions.” So I mean, I just, I have been really pleased with our reviewers. There was one other thing. I mean, I do sometimes, I do what you said, Jason. I mean, I go through and I'll tweak a sentence here, or take a sentence out, because it's more directed to the editor than to the author. I mean, in my experience, like you said, Jason, we want, I just want them all to come in, and everybody is like, “This is a great article! Let's publish this!” That doesn't happen, but what I have found . . . So this has been sort of interesting. I would say 95 percent of what I've sent back has been revise and resubmit, and that has been based on two reviewers who come in and say, “Revise and resubmit.” Hardly anybody has said, “Reject.” Well, I shouldn't say that, maybe about ten percent are the mad pool. About, you know, two percent are, “Oh, yeah, this is great. This is perfect the way it is.” Almost everyone comes back and says, “Revise and resubmit.” And the final essay is so much better. And you know, there's been a couple of times where people were a little huffy about, “Look at all these suggestions that have been made to me.” And so then I've had some follow up conversations with folks, you know, like Zoom calls. Let's go through the reviews. And then they revised. And the essays have just been really great. So I really love our review process because I think it creates really great articles.

KING: Yeah, I think that behind David's original vision was to try to be a little bit formative in that process rather than punitive, and so I think we both tried to keep that up a little bit. I mean, there's definitely essays that I'll do a desk reject on, like this is not even worth sending out to reviewers, and if reviewers are like, “This doesn't work,” we'll definitely honor that overall. Yeah, that was like you said, ten percent or something like that.

LYSAUGHT: And sometimes, you know, when there's a little bit of a difference of opinion, I'll go get a third opinion, to adjudicate between the two of them.

SHADLE: So that was an interesting point, that the community of scholars that we're working with kind of keeps the Reviewer 2 stuff to a minimum, because, like you said, people want to be charitable. But also I thought Jason made an interesting point, that the software can help minimize that, too. And I was thinking about that, it gives you specific prompts that you're supposed to focus on instead of, you know, just open-ended comments where you could say, “This is terrible,” right? And also that the editors come in and can see the comments before the writer sees them and be like, “Hey, this isn't really . . .” If a situation like that arose, you'd be like, “Could you say a little more,” something like that. So that's interesting. So you both talked about how you really want the manuscripts to be good and publishable when they come in. So that's a good lead in to my next question, which was, what would you tell writers to improve their chances? Or I guess we could just phrase it, what could writers do with those initial submissions that would make it easier to get these as publishable manuscripts right away.

LYSAUGHT: I would say, in my experience, a lot of the essays that come in look a lot like the essays I send in places, and they start out as a conference paper . . . . They start out as an idea. They move through the conference presentation stage, you know, which you're writing two weeks before the conference, and that's squeezing it in between things, right? So what you end up with is something that's pretty broad. And so a lot of the comments that come back are, “Focus, focus, focus.” “You've got two articles here. Focus on this article. Cut off this article. Make it two articles down the road.” Or a lot of times, I think we get what are, from people, really good first drafts. They've written it, you know, in the three weeks that they have between semesters, and you can tell by the time they get to the end that, “Oh, there's the idea that they really want to argue,” and they need to pull it back to the beginning, and then, just really tighten it up all the way through. So to me, those are the two things I've seen. One is scope, and then one is sort of just, you know, getting it through that second tightening and polishing stage. And then, I mean, that's just part of the writing process, right? And you know, in some ways, I think our review process functions as sort of a writing group, like if people had writing groups, their friends would tell them to do that, right, and they would go do that before they sent it in. But a lot of people, we kind of function that way, I think, which is a great service to the academy.

KING: Yeah. I’ll just echo what Therese said. They either will have a really good idea at the beginning, and then they . . . it kind of loses shape as it comes along, so it expands out. And if you can focus it on that one idea, it doesn't have to do everything. But I'm going to do this thing, and here's how I do it. That's one. The other one is that there's an idea, but it doesn't hit until the very end, and then really, they need to kind of invert it so that idea is right at the top. You'll find sometimes, and I know this is the dissertation mode to rehearse the literature, and I would say, No, tell me your constructive piece like you can do this nod, like let me set this up, that's fine. But the rehearsal of literature. I would diminish that, and let's see your insight, and that's usually sometimes buried at the front or at the beginning, and just not sort of followed through. But yeah, the scope and the focus, those are the two things, I think.

SHADLE: That's funny, because I struggled with those two exact things early in my career, and I had to teach myself, “This is not a mystery novel,” right?

*Laughter*

LYSAUGHT: Saving the punch for the end!

SHADLE: That the point should not be gradually revealed at the end. Right. You want to make your point right at the beginning.

KING: When I did Faith with Benefits, my editor was like, “Delete every paragraph at the end of every chapter!” I was like, “What?” He was like, “You’re just summarizing it. Your readers are smart. You don’t have to tell them what they just read.”

SHADLE: There’s lots of competing advice about summaries and transitions.

KING: Yeah. I always remember that. The line I really take from that is not about summaries, but more like your readers are smart, so you don’t need to keep on repeating stuff. If you have a clear structure, they’ll follow you and they’ll be happy. I appreciate your point. You have to teach yourself that.

LYSAUGHT: I think that's the thing, because I think a lot of people have to teach themselves that because they don't get taught that. Because we do . . . and I think this is a good thing . . . we get a lot of papers or manuscripts from graduate students. And you can tell they’re still learning the writing process, a lot of them. But, you know, I kind of wish that their professors or their advisors would give them more writing advice because a lot of what they’re doing is, they’re just not quite . . . . they don’t have the academic genre down yet, right? They don’t have some of the little moves that, sometimes you can only learn those by doing them. But I mean, writing really is a learning process, and I’m still learning it here, many decades later.

SHADLE: That’s right, that’s right. So going back to something, what you were saying before about it being a writing group. I was also thinking earlier you were talking about how you have these conflicting incentives from the editors and the reviewers. The editors want articles they can put in, whereas the reviewers want the . . . they want to show that they put some work into it, and they have all these revisions they want, but I think the writers have their own incentives, too. They want it to be just good enough to get that “revise and resubmit,” because then they know they’ve got it, but they’re not going to put the work in to it to make it perfect because they don’t know if it’s going to be accepted or not.

LYSAUGHT: Right.

SHADLE: So they have the incentive to make it good enough, and then they say, “I’ll fix it up later,” whereas that goes against the incentive of the editors who want it ready to go right away.

LYSAUGHT: Well, yes and no, though, because, not that I want to encourage too much of this, but I’ve told people, I’ve told students and colleagues that before, and they’re struggling with an essay, and I say, “Just send it in, and they’ll tell you what to revise.” Because you can sit there and theoretically revise it in your head forever, and then it’s not going to match this particular set of reviewers, or that one, or whatever. So if you’re open to revising it, then I think it’s a really good process to get it to be: “Oh, it’s just good enough. I know there’s some things I need to work on, but I’ll send it in,” because that starts the conversation, and if you’re open to revising it in the next six months, and sending it in again, I think that’s better than a lot of times waiting until it’s perfect, because all these things, it’s an ongoing conversation, right? It’s never going to be exactly finished.

KING: I had Peter Phan in grad school, briefly, before he went . . . . he was at CUA,⁵ then he went to Georgetown. And he was like, “Send it in! Send it in! Send everything in! Send everything in!” He was also like, “You’ll get feedback, even if you get a rejection. You get feedback and revise it, send it somewhere else. You’ll get the feedback that you need.” And so, I don’t know . . . you know, actually for JMT, I think that would be fine, but it was good, “Get over the hump. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Let’s get it in there. Get it enough. Let’s see where we’re going, get some feedback.” And if you, especially if you’re open to the feedback you can really be like, “Oh, I got it,” and that sometimes that feedback was the way I learned, “Oh, I’m not doing this,” and that feedback is helping me. Once I calmed down, got some distance from the perspective, I was able to pick that up and learn it, especially in my earlier days. It was just hard. Yeah, I didn’t get the training.

LYSAUGHT: Yeah.

SHADLE: Okay. So moving on to a more personal question. So it’s clear that being an editor is a time commitment. So how do you integrate that with your other roles? As a teacher, as a scholar? And I forgot to mention in the introduction, so Jason, your work focuses a lot on dating and relationships, but also you have some things on the role of theology and faith in higher ed. And then Therese your work focuses on health care ethics and bioethics, but looking at it through the angle of Catholic social teaching and social justice. So how do you integrate this into your entire vocation?

LYSAUGHT: I wouldn’t use the word “integrate.”

SHADLE: Or not!

LYSAUGHT: Because, as Jason will attest, you know, you think that your job is to turn things over to other people. I don’t know. I spend a lot of time every day working on the Journal of Moral Theology, which is all good, but it is . . . it has been a lot of time.

KING: Therese used to criticize me for doing everything. She said, “You’ve got to share work. You’ve got to share work.”  So I was like, “We do, we do!” And then we got a board. We share more work, and then we just keep expanding work.

LYSAUGHT: That’s our problem.

KING: Anyways.

LYSAUGHT: But I think that’s also related to our somewhat alternative vocation with the journal, that we can also talk about in a minute, like, “What is our mission?” But I mean, apart from certain sorts of kvetching, it’s really great, right? Because I read, I am forced to read. This is like what you were saying about David Matzko McCarthy. I’m forced to read all the stuff I would not normally take time to read, because I read what I have to read for the next whatever task I’m doing. So I get to read widely outside my little lane of bioethics and liturgy and ethics, and it’s just great. You know, it’s because I’m . . . so I’m reading all these people who are doing some interdisciplinary stuff, and . . . Thomas Aquinas . . . But for me, the other really great thing, being in this particular position, is I just get to talk to and get to know . . . even though it’s through the Scholastica interface or email, I get to know all these people who, you know, some of them I’ve known by name, but haven’t had any real substantive interactions with, or you pass them at a conference or whatever, you go see their paper, which is great. But I’ve just gotten to know all these people, and I get . . . I feel like, Jason, you could also say . . . but I feel like I’m facilitating these people, right? I’m encouraging them to send in their work, and then send them their work. I tweet all these people every day. I tweet some scholar, “Here’s the article we published.” So, I think that’s been a real plus, that’s the grunt work.

KING: I think that that's for me how I, I don't know, hold it all together. Yeah, because it's always kind of scrambling a bit, but I guess I see my work . . . Especially someone coming out of . . . BC⁶ always has this huge network of people, Duke, especially under Hauerwas, had a whole bunch of networked people, Domers,⁷ you always know those sort of Domers, so coming out of CUA, I didn’t . . . especially CUA in the 90s doing ethics, that’s not a large community of people.

*Laughter*

KING: So I didn't have a community, so I've always kind of like looked for community, and really saw my work as part of a community, like, “Oh, I can contribute here, contribute there. I can do scholarship,” but I also like listening to people and hearing people. And so part of the journal was that, and at first I thought like, oh, it's something I can contribute to the guild, like I can help the journal, it can be a place of conversation where lots of sorts of people come together. And Therese’s point is absolutely true, that well, then, suddenly, you’re talking to people and you’re like, “Hey! You should submit this paper in it. Oh, what do you do?” And then you get to talk to this person and get to talk to that person. Or someone’s essay comes in, and then you get to have an exchange with them, and then you get to meet them at a conference. So for me, it’s part of the community-building piece. It’s something that I hope the journal helps everybody, but it’s also like a hub through which you can, you, not just me, but everybody, connect to everybody else, and that was my hope when I took over. Can you make it a place where people go. So the scholarship gets better. There’s no straight lines, right? But because I’ve read all these pieces, not everything just in my field, my scholarship shifts a little bit, my teaching shifts, because I’m thinking about these sorts of issues. I re-worked my bioethics class partly from my conversations with Therese and the stuff I’d read. But then the Catholic Bioethics and Social Justice book came out, and I’m like, “Oh, I should use that,” and that helped me to retool what was going on, so . . .

LYSAUGHT: Product placement! Thank you very much.

KING: It's great. So that . . . it’s just part of the community is the way I see the things that I love to do, and now I get to share and connect with other people.

LYSAUGHT: And I think another piece of that, or in addition, is especially in the move to the open access. I mean the Scholastica version of the open access, which made it more open access. And I think this was actually part of your vision, Jason, was really expanding the conversation outside the United States, right? So for me in this role, I’ve just been introduced to this much more global landscape of people doing Catholic theological ethics who are in a lot of different social locations, different than in the United States, you know, in Latin America, and in Puerto Rico, and in Africa, and Australia. And so that to me has been just really personally and professionally enriching. And I also think that we try to do . . . we try to be a scholarly, double blind, peer-reviewed journal that is also doing different things, or trying to innovate a little here and there, and figure out what’s the model and what should be the model. So you know, sometimes we do these little symposia of conversations among people from different locations that bridge some different genres. A couple of years ago we did an edition entirely in Spanish from a round table conference in Latin America. And that to me is also professionally enriching, because it helps me think differently about what is our discipline? What’s our vocation? I mean, kind of like what you’re doing, Matt, right? How do we . . . What is theological ethics? What is theology? Where is it done? How is it done? Who’s it done for? What are the sources? Who are the audiences? So really, I think, because of the open access modality, it lets us be more creative and think differently and try things, and sometimes they don’t work, but you know, then we try things and they do work, and so I don’t know, I actually have a lot of fun with this.

KING: I was just looking at the country hits over the last month, and you know the US is the highest, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, of course, and then you get Italy, Denmark, India, New Zealand, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, and Czechoslovakia has like a hundred hits over the last month, on the web site! I don't even know what they're looking at!

LYSAUGHT: Probably one of the books.

KING: Yeah, probably. Yeah, that's probably true. So it's . . . That's fun. It's communal, and it's a bigger community than I really thought it was at the beginning.

SHADLE: So you mentioned open access, and just to let listeners and readers know that’s . . . So with the move to electronic and digital publishing, you know, a lot of journals have been bought up by these big companies, and they create these subscription packages for journals, which can be pretty hefty. And so libraries will buy these packages of journals. And then that's how you get access to them. And so open access is an alternative to that where the articles are provided free. And so it can . . . You know, I think that something like, you get ten times as many readers, or something like that, which is a definite benefit. But there's also some downsides, and you mentioned one is that you have to do your own proofing. So tell us . . . the Journal of Moral Theology is open access. So why was that decision made, and what benefits have come from that? And you said there's been kind of an upgrading by using the Scholastica software.

KING: So yeah, David started that. I don’t . . . It's a good question about why he . . . I think it was he needed a repository for the old articles and he didn’t . . . and Wipf and Stock published the paper issues, but you know, they would kind of float around, and he wanted something more stable that they could continue to access. And so the library at the Mount said, “Yeah, sure, we can put in this repository.” But what they did was took the PDF of the whole volume and stuck it in their library web site. So you had to go through like six layers to get to the PDF that was just the whole issue. You couldn’t pull out the particular ones, or search for particular ones. You could only search for the volume, and that was it. You could access it, but not individually, not easily. And Google. The other thing was that Google wasn’t tracking it, either. And Google is a big . . . one of the search engines that tracks those things. So this was our move to Scholastica, it was just to open this up. But my other real insight, though, on that was . . . I’ve got this friend, well, he’s a former student and now he’s a colleague, Luke Briola, who graduated from BC master’s, CUA grad school, and he . . . I asked him, I’m like, “Do you . . . How do you get your articles?” And he’s like, “Just whatever is free.” Right? And he’s like . . . Theological Studies at the time, and it might still be, it’s indexed on EBSCO⁸ but there’s a two-year embargo on it so you can’t see issues for two years unless you’re subscribing to it, and he’s like, “I just don’t read it, and I go somewhere else.” That struck me there. That model of putting these paywalls up is just ensuring that the next generation of scholars is not going to read you. And so they’re becoming . . . I’m worried, because I really like Theological Studies. It's just becoming more and more irrelevant because it’s only this older and older generation that’s reading it, and younger ones are like, “I can get something else. And so if I want to read something, I’m going to Google it.” And especially if you go global, they’re googling it or using some other search engine to find that. And we do get hits through EBSCO through the library pieces, but not as much as you would get from this through the open-ended searches. And so I just thought, if people want to read it, you’ve got to do that, and I’m worried that if the paywall . . . it's just shutting people out, and then it turns out this was the other piece that dawned on me later, probably from other people’s insights that, then who are the people you’re excluding, right? It’s the people that are financially disadvantaged or institutionally disadvantaged. And so you’re creating this exclusive market around it, and none of that seemed to be appropriate for a journal of Catholic moral theology.

SHADLE: I mean, the whole reason to write this stuff is we want people to read it. And then, you know, you’ve got people in the church, you’ve got just interested amateurs or whatever and . . . if you block off access to that, you’re . . . it doesn’t really serve anything.

LYSAUGHT: So, right. People want to be read, right? Scholars. And then other people are like, “Oh, scholars! Ivory Tower! You’re talking to yourself.” You know, all the kind of stereotypes. But you know, especially with ethics, people are writing about, for the most part, contemporary issues that . . . things that are relevant questions right now in society that people could use, maybe, a little help thinking through. Like in January we published an article by Levi Checketts on the ethics of downloading Grindr data and chasing down people who aren’t honoring their vow of celibacy, which, two months later, again this is in the news. So in some ways, the open access also helps create this new interface between theological scholarship, ethical scholarship, and questions that Catholic lay people and everybody else are actually dealing with. You know, we have a . . .we could publish this once a year, or four times a year . . . but we have an issue coming out on gun violence in October, which is, unfortunately, not even a perennial issue, it’s an every two weeks sort of issue. So, by being open access, our scholarship is available to other scholars, but it’s also available to the public, which I think is a really huge service of the journal to the world. And then you get into the . . . so, I mean, we are an ethics journal, right? . . . So the questions of social justice in terms of access for folks in Czechoslovakia or Africa, and then helping them to feel that they’re part of this community, in this conversation, and making that happen. I think it’s just a real benefit of this model.

SHADLE: Well, and another point, and this is opening a door that we could spend a whole other hour talking about, but this walling off of theology just opens the door for others to step up and use modern forms of media to, you know, take up the mantle of theology in ways that are negative. So, I’m watching the time here. So, what are some of the downsides, though, of open access?

*Laughter*

LYSAUGHT: All the things you just mentioned.

KING: For me, the exchange is always money and time, right? If you have money, then you can buy, you can get people to do things and save yourself time. And without money, then you got to spend time. And so that’s what it is. So, you got to get more people. We have to get more and more people committed to it and volunteer their time because we don’t have a lot of money.  Now you can beg and borrow. We haven’t really done a campaign, or asked for donations, and I think you could do that. I think a lot of people would step up for that as well, so you could do more fundraising if you really wanted to. But it’s the time and money exchange. So without that, without a lot of money . . . We have some, but it’s usually just enough to cover the cost of hosting the site on Scholastica, and maybe a few others. But then we just spend a lot of time. My worry, Therese probably shares this, is Bill Collinge is utterly irreplaceable. The guy knows, he knows not just the Chicago Manual of Style, and can copy edit, and he’s got this eagle eye, but he’s also widely read. He knows both theology, philosophy, literature, he’s an expert . . .

LYSAUGHT: Eight languages.

KING: Yeah, eight languages. He’s . . . We’re doing this issue in Spanish, and he’s like, “Well, you know, I can kind of do Spanish.” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure, go ahead and do it.” He’s like, “I’ll look at it just to see.” And he just likes doing it. And I tried to pay him. I could never pay him enough, but I’ve tried to give him a stipend, and he’s like, “I don’t want it.” So that saves us in many ways, and that’s kind of irreplaceable, and that money, you would . . . you just couldn’t pay. You know, you have to pay a ton of money for that kind of quality, that sort of work. And that’s true for our book editors, who are always . . . the associate editors, and every stage down the road, people are pro bono doing work. And so you have to have a lot of people spending a lot of time to compensate for the lack of money.

LYSAUGHT: Yeah. And the other downside is, like you said, Matt, who’s taken over the space of the conversation. Being open access, you open yourselves up to the world, the public, and you know, when you’re doing that on Twitter, you sometimes get people in your Twitter feed who are not saying very nice things, shall we say. And I think a lot of them are bots. But we published one very innocuous piece this summer (written by me) which was just, you know, a description of a book that came out by the Pontifical Academy of Life, it wasn’t even a book review. It was just an introduction to this volume, and the Twitter heat was, I mean, I just wasn’t ready for it, right? You know, most of the time we get like three or four likes or something by the author of the essay, and two of their friends, and Chris McMahon and Jason. . . but you know, it just blew up. But that was instructive and very helpful, knowing that you’re entering into a conversation with many different kinds of people.

SHADLE: Yeah, that's a good point, because it is . . . while I would say overall, that is a good thing that this material is getting out to the public, it is going out to the public, and so there's that public exposure and so forth. Okay, I think we can close with this question. So obviously open access is an important trend in academic publishing these days. But what are some other trends that you see emerging in academic publishing, especially journal publishing. Either trends that JMT is picking up, or just things that you’ve observed.

LYSAUGHT: Jason, aren’t you working on something on that?

KING: I am. I'm trying to think about the field in this CTS presentation. In publishing, I . . . Therese and I toyed around with this, but we haven’t landed on any . . . I guess we’re sensing the future but haven’t decided on a process. But the old model of issue by issue, two issues, having it print . . . Really with open access, you could do it much more platform based, and you could do things a little bit more responsive. And as soon as things were, you know, reviewed and approved and then formatted, you could automatically upload those things and collate it later, if you needed something there. You don’t even really need that if you have the DOI⁹ pieces. So I think there might be a move, at least I see in open access. I don’t think if you’re trying to make money, where you need a product to sell, that it will move in this direction. But the open access provides this flexibility of the platform where you could move to those more quick takes, more spread throughout the whole year. You’ve got to find a way, you’d have to find a way to connect with people on a regular basis, like Substack. But I think there’s something there that’s going to shift that keeps it a little bit more relevant, and I think that the pace of things moves so fast, and you can’t move . . . you don’t want to move so fast that you’re just like . . . . it’s like Twitter, or some other sort of social media. But you can do something a little bit more substantive that’s not under a two-year embargo, or you don’t have to wait until it comes out until, like, July, and so you could . . . there’s some flexibility, I think, with the platform, that if done right, could really help out the scholarly conversation. I don’t know what that model is, but Therese and I have talked about it a lot.

LYSAUGHT: I think, in some ways . . . So we did have a conversation about a year ago about moving to that early view, of publishing the articles as they come in one at a time. We realized, alright, our time between accepting an article and publishing it is probably the shortest in the industry, I will say. It’s a really short turnaround partly because we do four issues a year, and partly because being open access, we don’t really have page limits, right? So if something comes in that’s really good, we can just stick it in an issue. And the rate-limiting step for us on that, we decided was, again, with our pro bono folks. It’s helpful for them to get eight articles at a time, do their task, move them on to the next person. And if things were coming in one at a time, it would just be a little bit more, I think, too much work for our people. But I think the other thing that I just noticed about us is that other journals, because they’re not on our same sort of platform, aren’t doing them. You know, we do a lot of . . . We have to give a shout to Alex Martins, who is our communication guy who does our newsletter . . . we tweet every single chapter and every single article we publish. We do a little social media promo for each article with the link to the article. Sometimes we then have a conversation about those with the Catholic Moral Theology blog. So we also tried to do some other sorts of dissemination and creating conversations about people’s scholarship that you just can’t do with a traditional publishing model, especially that’s behind a two-year paywall. So is that a trend? Will that keep going? I don’t know. But . . .

SHADLE: Yeah, I think that's an issue. And actually, what it reminds me of is in music, with the creation of MP3s, you know, a couple of decades ago, do albums make sense anymore? But musicians still continue to produce albums, so I don’t know if it’s just inertia or if there’s some underlying reason. But that was a good point about the work process, but also, I think, just finding it after it's been published, it's just, you know, having a volume number and an issue number and everything. There needs to be some organization. But yeah, there's got to be some way that you could publish them continuously but still have a reference system. But anyway.

KING: There’s some flexibility there that I . . . you need some organization, and I just don't know what it is yet. But that’s something that I think people are going to keep tinkering with until somebody hits it, and then we’re all going to be like, “Alright, there it is.”

SHADLE: Yeah. So let's close. Was there anything else you've thought of as we've been talking that you want to share here at the end?

LYSAUGHT: I will say, I think one of the interesting opportunities and challenges in this job, and I think Jason can probably agree, is that we try to, we're trying to be the big tent, right? Catholic moral theology is a big, multifaceted conversation, shall you say? And one of the things we want to do is to bring all these people who are in these conversations that sometimes can get very siloed into the same space. Now that does not necessarily mean that they are yet talking to each other, but I do think that that’s part of our mission, is to really forward the best parts of these various conversations and to expand that then into some international ones, too, and to provide . . . Some of the folks who are usually in their own little silo can actually see what some of these other conversations look like, and do that as part of one journal rather than, especially in these sorts of . . . You know, we’ve got two Catholic theology conferences now, and everybody’s splitting into their ideological camps. And trying to resist that is, I think, part of our mission, too.

KING: Yeah, I echo that. I always hoped it's the place . . . I wanted it to be a place where you just go to . . . read, you go, “Oh, what's coming out this month,” you know. “Oh, that's not my camp, but I need to pay attention to what’s coming out of JMT.” And if that’s the communal piece, regardless of where it’s coming from, that would be wonderful.

SHADLE: So that’s interesting, too, because the digital media and social media can reinforce that siloing. And so it’s helpful to be using that technology to kind of push in the opposite direction of creating a big tent or to bring people together.

LYSAUGHT: Yeah.

SHADLE: Okay, well thank you Jason and Therese. This has been fun.

LYSAUGHT: Oh, thank you. This is great, and it’s so fun to talk about the journal, and I’m very supportive of your new initiative. So I’m glad to be one of the first people featured in Window Light.

1. "Notes on Moral Theology” was a regular essay that appeared in the journal Theological Studies that provided a summary and analysis of recent work in Catholic moral theology. It has more recently expanded to include notes on specific areas of Christian ethics such as sexual ethics or economic ethics.

2. Atla is a leading aggregator and academic database in the fields of theology and religious studies.

3. Mount Saint Mary’s University, in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

4. Catholic Theological Society of America.

5. The Catholic University of America, in Washington, DC.

6. Boston College.

7. "Domer,” i.e., a student at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana.

8. EBSCO is a leading academic aggregator and maintains several academic databases across many different disciplines.

9. Digital Object Identifier, a unique string of characters used to identify a specific journal or article.