If Books and Culture Disappears, We All Lose

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For years now, I’ve been an avid consumer of Books & Culture, a Christian periodical edited by John Wilson under the Christianity Today publishing umbrella. My love for B&C was born the day my father received the first issue of his subscription. That was in the mid-2000s, while I was still attending a semi-rural public high school in Ohio. I cherished finding the journal folded in half inside our mailbox, usually enclosing a variegated stack of other mail. Those tall, bent pages of text and whimsical illustrations introduced me to serious Christian reflection on—and work within—the worlds of letters, the arts, and culture. Oh, my God, I’d think. This is what it’s supposed to look like!

But times are hard for print publications. Since June, B&C has been doing a pledge drive to help the magazine stay afloat into 2014. They need $250,000. So far, they’ve received pledges for about $140,000. Their deadline is this Monday, September 9th. To make it absolutely clear: if Books & Culture doesn’t receive $110,000 in pledges by next Monday, Books & Culture will have to stop publishing after the November/December issue of this year.

I can’t overstate what a loss B&C’s disappearance would be. Nowhere else will you find an evangelical journal with the same depth and breadth, the same consistently high-grade editorial quality, the same brainy cast of contributors. I also don’t think there’s an evangelical journal quite as apt to capture the imagination of a bookish Christian teenager, one whose hunger for substance is perhaps largely unknown to him. For the sake of that kid, sitting in his parents’ kitchen pondering how best to procure another tired comedy to while away the school night, consider a pledge. Provide for that hopeful eventuality: a quirky cover facing up on the table, a change of evening plans, a fragile mind awash in ideas and encouraged to follow the joy in them back to a God bigger than He seemed before.

By pledging, you’ll simply be committing to support the magazine for an amount you specify, by a date you specify; there’s no immediate monetary transaction. It’s simple, quick, and painless, even. Please do it.

You can pledge here.