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Mission

Perspective on Communication

Across oceans and continents man can now transmit images as well as sounds instantaneously. He can record, reproduce, and distribute awesome quantities of words and pictures with astonishing accuracy and rapidity. Millions of moderns spend significant portions of their lives receiving signals through the new media. Communicators are skillfully employing the results of motivational research. Scientists are at the threshold of further dramatic technical advances in communication.

But have we made comparable progress in the ethics of communication? Do we recognize that what we are says more than what we utter? While growing closer spatially and temporally through modern communications media, are we becoming alienated from communication with what is noble, just, true, and beautiful? While proliferating words, have we known the primal Word made flesh? While narrowing the communications gap between Europe and North American through the stellar television satellite, have we spanned the chasm between parent and child at home? In order to enrich our perspective on communication, this issue of MISSION focuses on such questions.