Intelligence is usually defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. Our Fall 2015 issue explores many ways of knowing and many skillful ways of sharing what we know. A new way of knowing may open in the midst of great suffering, as it did for intuitive Laura Day, interviewed here. As a child growing up in New York City, Day discovered that she could directly see and sense things immediately, without study or reason. Decades later, she has come to understand that her intuition and her skill at healing are related, and that to give is inevitably to receive. Elsewhere in the issue, “Street Smart in Afghanistan,” by James Opie, shares the touching story of an intelligent child growing up impoverished. “With no parents or permanent home, he seemed extraordinarily deprived. Yet I had witnessed support flowing his way.” The boy, Nabi, learned that giving attention was a way of receiving the help he needed to survive.

Learning itself may be a way to share a deeper knowledge, as it was for a small group of intellectuals who called themselves the Inklings. J.R.R. Tolkien described the name as “a pleasantly ingenious pun … suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.” Yet in an excerpt from their learned literary history, The Fellowship, Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski reveal that some of the Inklings (including Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) were able to transform their knowledge of mythology and medieval culture into an enduring art intended “to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty.”

In his exquisite “Not Knowing, Non-Being, and the Power of Nothingness,” modern Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee reminds us that there is a mystical intelligence that comes from the hidden face of God. “Because just as the Absolute is, the Absolute is not.” Yet in this realm also intelligence is reciprocal, between soul and God. Is the ­inextricable connection between giving and receiving, between acquiring and applying knowledge, a mark of human intelligence? In “The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence,” Parabola editor Jeff Zaleski raises questions about what it means to be intelligent … and human.

—Tracy Cochran

Cover Description: E. Irving Couse, The Historian, 1902. Color plate from The How and Where Library, 1909