Books & Culture

Books & Culture: A Christian Review (B&C) was a bimonthly book review journal published by Christianity Today International from 1995 to 2016.[1] The journal was launched a year after the publication of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark A. Noll, and it sought to address that scandal by providing a vehicle for Christian intellectual engagement with ideas and culture, modeled on the New York Review of Books.[2] It was launched and subsidized through its early years with the help of grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts.[3] John Wilson edited the publication and Noll and Philip Yancey served as cochairs of the editorial board.[4]

While the publisher and the majority of Books & Culture's writers were evangelical, the magazine was not limited to evangelical perspectives. "Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, and a few nonbelievers" could be found among the publication's contributors, according to the New York Times.[2] In 2000, Alan Wolfe observed in The Atlantic that "In addition to evangelicals, figures as diverse as the economist Glenn C. Loury; the historian Eugene Genovese; Richard Bernstein, of New School University; and the novelist Larry Woiwode have written for the magazine, which has featured interviews with Stanley Crouch, Adam Michnik, and Francis Fukuyama."[5]

Books & Culture was considered "the leading journal of evangelical Protestant engagement with the scholarly disciplines and the arts"[6] and enjoyed a loyal following among both self-styled evangelical intellectuals and the wider publishing industry,[7][8] but it was never financially self-sustaining.[9][3] In 2013 it narrowly avoided closure through a Twitter-driven fundraising push that secured sufficient donations and pledges to keep the magazine afloat into the following year and beyond.[10] Wilson speculated in an interview after the closure was announced that it might have been easier to attract donors if the magazine had functioned as "sort of a culture war vehicle," but that had never been the vision of the publication.[3]

In the Books & Culture podcast, Wilson regularly highlighted other periodicals that he believed would appeal to readers of Books & Culture, including The Other Journal, The Englewood Review of Books, and Image.[11] Commentators discussing the demise of Books & Culture identified these and other publications that might be considered successors to the journal, such as Mars Hill Audio Journal, Touchstone, and Sojourners.[9][12] In December 2016, it was announced that Wilson would be editing a new publication starting in spring 2017 called Education & Culture;[13] that online-only review ceased publication in October 2017.[14]