HISTORY OF THE JOURNAL

The Journal was founded in 1988 on the initiative on Fr. Tadeusz Styczeń (1931–2010), who then became its long-tenured editor-in-chief. However, a relevant factor in the launching of the Journal was the commitment of Pope John Paul II to the idea of creating and independent academic periodical in the then communist Poland. In 1987, before the Pope’s second pilgrimage to Poland, the representatives of the Vatican who negotiated the terms of the trip with the Polish communist administration declared that starting a new academic journal at the Catholic University of Lublin was among the essential conditions of the event taking place.

When the first volumes of Ethos appeared, the freedom of speech was still “rationed” in Poland. Simultaneously, however, there was a growing need for a critical debate on the Marxist concept of culture as well as on the new intellectual currents of the time. The first issues of Ethos were published still under the communist law, which involved censorship of all the publications. Thus, the editors clearly indicated in the relevant articles which parts of them had been censored and in which places portions of the text had been removed by the censor. Censorship applied to all the papers, regardless of the intellectual provenience of their authors.

Fr. Tadeusz Styczeń SDS was the editor-in-chief of Ethos until 2005, when Fr. Alfred M. Wierzbicki took over. His immediate successor was Ewa Agnieszka Lekka-Kowalik, who served as editor-in-chief from 2014 to 2022. Since 2022, the editor in chief is Fr. Marek Słomka.