Autumn 2002 The rate our present pope is declaring saints and blesseds allows Carmel to benefit from an interesting phenomenon: very recent saints have left behind lengthy commentary on other, long-respected, saints of our Order. This has occurred in the case of Saint Edith Stein, who was canonized in 1998 and who did an entire volume about the teaching (as well as the life) of sixteenth-century Saint John of the Cross.     She composed a book-length manuscript called The Science of the Cross for the 1942 fourth centenary of the birth of Saint John of the Cross. Her aim was to make him better known to German-speaking readers, and also to offer them some special new insights. For instance, her consideration of the writings he left behind contains her own ideas about the "I, freedom, and person," plus the relationship between the night the soul enters and the cross.     Long since out of print, this book was translated in 1960 by Dr. Hilda Graef of Oxford. Our publishing house is expecting to have it back in circulation before the end of this year. We asked the translator of Edith Stein's Life in a Jewish Family and Self-Portrait in Letters, Sr. Josephine Koeppel, to do a new translation. In a somewhat "cross-over" fashion--see next segment--its editor was Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh who has written a marvelously instructive and contemporary 26-page introduction. His up-close and long-standing expertise in the thought of Saint John of the Cross will sharpen interest in the Stein text, and make this new volume a sure-to-be-included item on our friends' reading lists.      In this anniversary year of the baptism of Edith Stein in the Catholic Church (1922), as well as the anniversary of her passage into eternal rest (1942), we are glad to include this new title in our series of "The Collected Works of Edith Stein" where it will occupy the number six slot. May it deepen our appreciation and understanding of the two perceptive thinkers she and Saint John of the Cross are in Carmel and in the Church.        The editorial efforts of Fr. Steven Payne, series editor of "The Collected Works of Edith Stein," have brought out a long-awaited and first-time-ever-in-English work by Edith Stein, i.e., her magnum opus Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being.      ICS Publications took delivery early in September of this dense contribution of Edith Stein to our understanding of philosophical thought through the ages from Aristotle to Saint Thomas Aquinas and on to her beloved "Master" Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.      For those interested in particularly Christian themes it is worth listing the following evocative chapter headings from the later part of her 613-page long "essay": "The Realm of Celestial Spirits and Their Mediatorship"; "The Image of the Trinity in Inanimate Corporeal Things"; "The Supernatural Image of God: The Indwelling of God in the Soul"; "The Difference Between the Image of God in Angels and in Human Beings"; "The Vocation of the Soul to Eternal Life"; and "The Unity of the Human Race. Head and Body One Christ."      ICS Publications wishes on this occasion to thank all those who have contributed many long hours to the completion of this significant publishing project. We are very appreciative of financial assistance granted us so that we might be able to make the volume available at a quite reasonable price. (Fr. Payne pays tribute to them as he acknowledges our collaborators and backers in his "Foreword to the ICS Publications Edition.")        On Sunday, September 15 an article about contemporary Jewish-Catholic understanding appeared in the weekly news roundup section of the New York Times. (That same day in the evening Yom Kippur was due to begin, and those who are familiar with her life recall Edith was born on Yom Kippur back in 1891.) "Catholics, Jews and the Work of Reconciliation" was the title of the article. It did not mention Edith Stein in particular, but the text was set so as to surround the photo below (appearing in a 5 x 7 inch format) with the following caption: "Edith Stein, beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987, was born Jewish, became a nun and died in Auschwitz in 1942." Strange how the Times' editors did not point to the pope's subsequent and more recent gesture of canonizing her on October 11, 1998.