We can now rest easy, knowing we gave it a shot
It was the evening of September 17, 2020—Constitution Day. I was sitting outside a Microtel Inn in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania with Eric Miller, my longtime friend and collaborator and professor of history at nearby Geneva College. It was a chilly night, a clear sign that summer was on its way out.
I’d come to Beaver Falls to deliver Geneva’s Constitution Day lectures. Earlier that evening I’d spoken on the founding fathers’ use of the Bible to justify American independence. Eric drove me back to the hotel for the night and we spent some time catching up. I hadn’t seen him since COVID-19 paralyzed the country. In fact, this was my first speaking engagement since the quarantine.
The 2020 election was several weeks away and our conversation turned toward the current political moment. If the American people denied Donald Trump a second term in office, what would it mean for the shape of public discourse? What kind of intellectual resources were available for moving forward in such a time as this?
During COVID-19, I had started to think about the best way to bring my thirteen-year-old blog, The Way of Improvement Leads Home, into conversation with other writers. I was publishing a lot of anti-Trump material as a form of moral chemotherapy, but now, with the potential of Trump leaving the scene, I was eager to join other intellectuals who were thinking about politics differently, or perhaps not thinking about politics at all. Maybe The Way of Improvement Leads Home could be a part of something bigger.
I hadn’t planned on raising the possibility of launching a little magazine that night, but at one point in our conversation I just blurted it out. What if we start something new?
Eric may have been surprised by my spontaneous proposal, but he knew where I was going. Eric, Covenant College history professor Jay Green, and I had been scheming different forms of intellectual community ever since we became friends in the early 1990s while students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Within a few years there was “The Junto,” a vibrant discussion group of young evangelical historians who debated the finer points of faith and historical thinking on a new communication system called “email.” There was an effort, which included Jon Boyd, now the Academic Editorial Director at Intervarsity Press, to publish “Reviews in Christian History,” a quarterly journal of book reviews. That one almost got off the ground. We still laugh when we think about Jay passing out flyers for our new publication at an annual meeting of the Conference on Faith and History (CFH). The editors of the official CFH journal, Fides et Historia, and the organization’s old guard, started referring to us as the “young Turks.” But soon we were all immersed in taking comprehensive exams and writing dissertations. “Reviews in Christian History” never got off the ground. Eric recently told us that he still has at least one submission to the journal in his old files.
We kept collaborating. There were Conference on Faith and History biennial meetings to organize and an essay collection on the vocation of the Christian historian to publish. And there were the seven days we spent each year at Trinity University in San Antonio. We graded AP exams in heavily air-conditioned gymnasiums during the day and solved all the world’s problems at night in dorms, the cafeteria, and on the RiverWalk. Jay described the experience well. He said every day in San Antonio was like a long workday, and every evening was like Saturday night. We always left Texas exhausted, but filled with hope. There was so much good work that needed to be done.
The spirit of our previous collaborating hovered over the conversation in Beaver Falls on that late summer night in 2020 (and the following morning at a local Beaver Falls greasy spoon). The next day we were on a ZOOM call with Jay. Of course he was in. We had been thinking about something like Current for a long time. We were all in our 50s. It was now or never.
We believed that the time was right for a journal like Current. In 2016, Books & Culture, a bimonthly evangelical review modeled after the New York Times Review of Books and edited by John Wilson, had come to an end. We were all in graduate school when the inaugural issue dropped. I think I speak for Jay, Eric, and many others when I say that Books & Culture was an answer to prayer. We were in search of venues where deep evangelical thinking was happening. We had all read Mark Noll’s recent The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and were excited about our pursuit of academic callings. Perhaps Current could help fill the gap Books & Culture left behind.
We also knew that democratic conversation was in a state of crisis. The liberal framework that built and animated the institutions of American life was crumbling under the collective weight of authoritarian impulses on both the left and the right. We thought Current could clarify and explain this cultural moment. Though we were evangelical Christians, products of the late-twentieth century renaissance of the evangelical mind, we did not set out to create an explicitly Christian journal. Instead, we recruited writers who shared our concerns about the breakdown of the liberal order and were willing to speak truth that, well, had the potential to get all sides angry.
Along the way we helped introduce the world to Nadya Williams, a traditionalist, a feminist, and a brilliant young intellectual. She used her roles as book review editor, keeper of The Arena blog, and (eventually) managing editor to give voice to like-minded authors. We published the sparkling creative non-fiction of Robert Erle Barham, who helped introduce our readers to other writers occupying this literary space. We recruited some of the old Books & Culture crowd to join our ranks as contributing editors, including Tim Larsen, M. Elizabeth Carter, Shirley Mullen, Vincent Bacote, and Christine Bieber Lake. Some of the finest intellectual and cultural historians in the business graced our masthead—Jim Cullen, Agnes Howard, Adam Jortner, Christopher Shannon, and Daniel K. Williams. Younger writers such as Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, Jeremy Sabella, and Elizabeth Stice produced some of our most read feature articles.
And let’s not forget those who labored behind the scenes. Christine Walter and Gina Hale kept the books in order and paid our writers. Ben Martin kept the website running and assisted us through several transitions during the past four years. We benefited from the editorial assistance of Sarah Huffines and Felicia Wu Song and, in the last months, John Haas and Jim Wildeman. It was a great team.
But now it has come to an end, with our final feature appearing tomorrow, a day short of our four-year anniversary. I hope Current provided a refuge, maybe even a community, in the midst of our fractured culture. This little magazine was a labor of love. We can now rest easy, knowing that we at least gave it a shot. Thanks for joining us on the ride.
I’ll end my last Current piece with a word to my dear cofounders. To have one lifelong intellectual friend and fellow traveler is a blessing. But God gave me two. Thanks for everything, Jay and Eric. I know our journey will continue.
John Fea was the co-founder and Executive Editor of Current
