Sometimes the mostly RCA and CRC world of The Twelve can seem small. But the numbers of our humble blog tell a different story. The Twelve had over 61,000 views last month and one of our posts was linked by the Los Angeles Times, which was subsequently linked by MSN. Earlier in the summer, The Christian Century quoted us. We have shown up in the Washington Post, Des Moines Register, and Grand Rapids Press. As a famous personality might say, “That’s yuuuuge.”
It is our annual fund drive , and there are two points to our case for support.
The numbers are the first. We have become a significant voice in the religious and cultural landscape. If our voice matters to you, please support it.
Second, we are in the process of a redesign of our site that will provide even more important content for you. We need your help to do that.
A brief explanation of how we got here will help illuminate where we are going. The original Reformed Journal was founded several decades ago by a legendary group of Calvin College faculty and produced monthly by Eerdmans. When Eerdmans made the tough business decision to discontinue publishing the magazine, the mantle was passed to a group primarily from the RCA and Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought was born. It chugged along for several decades.
In 2011, as the online world was skyrocketing, The Twelve was started as the Perspectives blog. In 2019, the economics of the print magazine no longer made sense. A couple thousand copies were printed and mailed at great cost while we engaged tens of thousands of readers online at a much lower cost. We decided to focus all our efforts, blog and magazine, online.
We’ve had a few fits and starts with the online magazine. It took us a while to grasp that in the digital world the blog and the magazine don’t need to be separate things. The new site will reflect this reality with daily content from The Twelve and all sorts of additional content as well. We plan to roll out the new site early in 2021. We are hoping you will help us do that.
If what we do matters to you and you want to help us move into the future, please include The Reformed Journal in your year-end giving.
Thanks!!!
Support The Reformed Journal
Your monthly financial contribution allows us to continue to express the Reformed faith theologically; to engage issues that Reformed Christians meet in personal, ecclesiastical, and societal life.
Helpful history lesson, Jeff,
and compelling reasons to financially support ongoing efforts.
I’ll talk it over with Sharon. We’ll make a contribution.
As a long-time reader and contributor to The Reformed Journal and its successors, I enjoy the daily blog. But I very much miss the vehicle the old magazine was for bringing substantive reformed scholarship and commentary to a wider audience. The RJ made room for some of the things that didn’t have a place then in the scholarly journals, and in any case, were of interest to more than just scholars. Can we bring that back, please? Reformed scholarship needs that outlet.