The death of four remarkable people have this a particularly hard season for the world’s moral imagination, and we at The Hedgehog Review feel those losses keenly, even personally. Sociologist Robert Bellah (remembered by his former colleague Richard Madsen on p. 96), political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, culture critic and novelist Albert Murray, and poet Seamus Heaney all worked quite distinctive terrains. What united them, apart from excellence in their respective elds, was their deep engagement with the moral dilemmas and urgencies of our time. All were moralists in the sense described by Matthew Ward in the introduc- tion to his ne translation of Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger: “Despite appearances, though, neither Camus nor Meursault ever tried to make things simple for themselves. Indeed, in the mind of a moralist, simpli cation is tantamount to immorality....”