By Jonathan Meilaender
I hope you all enjoyed a relaxing break and a peaceful Christmas—as relaxing and peaceful as possible, anyway, given the circumstances. I am happy to welcome you back to another semester of The Review, and I hope that our issues will help you through the rest of this novel academic year. I want to thank you, once again, for the many contributions you made to our pages last semester: I was very pleased to hear from both faculty and students on so many issues, and to hear so many different positions on those issues. Please continue to submit! Remember, The Review is your newspaper. When you have an opinion to share with the Saint Vincent community, whether it’s a response to something you read in our pages or a sincere thought of your own, this is the place to do it. I also want to remind you that we welcome submissions of art, poetry, and photography. We were very pleased to feature several deserving photographers last semester, including Ian Tracey, Levi Kiss, and Br. Xavier O’Mara. But we need your help to find more deserving artists—young and old, students and faculty—for our pages.
I’d also like to take a moment to introduce three new staff members. Freshman Anthony Caporale is serving as a staff writer. He is joined by freshman Kyra Lipetzky. And sophomore Ellie Powell has taken on the crucial task of production manager, turning our words from documents into a physical—or digital—edition.
Speaking of digital editions, you will now find The Review as a weekly PDF, available for download on our website. I have tried out the PDF version myself and found that it works well both on phones and tablets (and I have a small phone!). You can find the page with the PDF downloads by clicking on the “e-Replica” tab on the menu at the very top of our homepage. It’s also a great way for your family back home to stay informed about your campus life.
Finally, I’d like to offer a small word of encouragement. Surely you have heard a great deal about how hard this semester will be, whether in the media, from friends, or even from the tone of some of SVC’s official emails. Certainly it will be difficult. But it also won’t be as hard as we think. Remember, we have done all this before: this is now our third semester since the pandemic began. In a way, of course, that’s depressing, but it should also serve as a reminder that we have succeeded twice before and can do so again. We know what works and what does not, and we have learned how to live in this new world. We will make it.