Life is blue, or red, or white. Why not black? There comes the rationalisation. Might those be our eyes and not life itself? The mind will continue seeing, exploring and thinking of this life, but not always of the eyes that see and perceive it. Ethics could be ridiculous, but somehow it cannot be wiped out of human’s existence, for in it theology touches philosophy and vice versa. Those delving into the depth and reams of why we should or should not do this and that are often alleged to have nothing to do than wasting time and perhaps changing only a handful of people out of billions. If we side with this charge, there is no need for any talks in academy. No need for a journal. The death of thought. And death is not life anymore. Yet we are still here, reading and thinking, seeing and imagining.

Melintas in this beginning of the new year wants to see and reimagine life. This life is not only about human’s life, but also everything that is growing, breathing, changing. This journal is always changing. It opposes sameness, for the latter simply tends towards death. In an article, the death penalty, as a violation of fundamental human rights, is considered wrong even if it could be shown that it uniquely met a vital social need. What makes the use of the death penalty even more indefensible is that it has never been shown to have any special power to meet any genuine social need. We will read also that an aesthetic experience is moving between the directions of a pendulum, i.e., when the artwork appeared to the awareness of the subject and when the experiencing subject narrated the experience. Not only an aesthetic experience encourages a particular moral action, the artwork itself might stand as a medium of a moral struggle for the betterment of the people. Something good is found as well in humour and laughing. There is an article saying that through this aspect of language, human as homo ridens, a laughing being, is illustrated as a playful being, a social being, and a spiritual being. But human is not alone. There is the environment and we need an environmental ethics. Human behaviour is to be conceived of and conducted in line with an eco-philosophy. The politics of environmental law is the policy direction to be set by the government so as to achieve the goals and objectives in the protection and the management of the environment. Lastly, by referring to the variety of cultures that have emerged and flourished in Indonesia, an author tries to figure the depth of ‘belief’ in God in relation to the respective cultural and spiritual expressions, and through the rituals performed by the people of belief (kepercayaan) Sunda Wiwitan. Those articles are blue, red, white, and black. You name it. Again, it is not so much the essence of life as the eyes that see, explore and think of it.

Now we might have changed a little bit if we read anything. Life itself is not changing. Our eyes are. Perhaps we will awake to see that our life as well as others’ are not that bad anyway. We are moving towards a difference, one step at a time. Ridiculousness might be just another way of saying a difference, as stupidity of a brilliance.

Editor.