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Focusing on Good Words as a representative example of the religious literary periodical, this chapter argues that the debut of Good Words in 1860 marks the rise of a different kind of religious periodical based on the literary models provided by the weeklies and monthlies discussed in the previous chapters. In particular, it considers how the devotional poetry published in Good Words promoted devotional reading practices, setting the periodical apart from its direct competitors, All the Year Round and the Cornhill. The first half of the chapter focuses on the form of the periodical’s devotional poetry, including a discussion of parables and hymns. The second half discusses how the periodical’s illustrations contribute to the self-reflexive, affective, and often devotional nature of the monthly’s poetry, creating a space for Christian contemplation within the busy pages of the periodical press.

This chapter examines the field of religious publishing in the 1970s and early 1980s by focusing on Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), a layperson's guide to end-times prophecy, and placing it in its evangelical cultures of letters. Drawing on coverage of religious books in Publishers Weekly and in the religious periodicals Christian Century (liberal Protestant) and Christianity Today (evangelical), it considers how The Late Great Planet Earth became a blockbuster bestseller through its accessible, engaging presentation free of esoteric theology and difficult religious jargon; its appeal to a new, nondenominational youth audience; and its innovative marketing. It also looks at the controversy surrounding the non-inclusion of The Late Great Planet Earth in any bestseller list—despite the fact that it was the best-selling book of the 1970s—because it sold primarily through Christian bookstores.

From the beginning of theological education in the United States, pastors, priests, and rabbis have been educated as leaders in public life by being producers of culture. This chapter describes how theological schools prepared clergy for leadership in five social arenas: families, congregations, schools, voluntary societies, and published media. Families were the seedbeds of religious identity and character, congregations became charismatic communities of piety and action, schools developed cultural capital and moral practices, voluntary societies mobilized resources and mass movements to reshape society, and popular media built national communities of religious identity and reform. These five social arenas also operated in harmony for clergy and religious communities to influence public morality and social discourse. Through their leadership in family life, educating youth, writing and publishing, and leading voluntary associations, the clergy mobilized aspects of their religious traditions to shape public narratives, symbols, and practices. In turn, this wider social engagement helped expand and renew the religious traditions they represented.

This chapter considers how a growing taste for poetry changed how readers understood the Bible. Literary sensibilities in the nineteenth century are usually associated with a small coterie of northeastern liberal Protestants. But fascination with poetry and literature flourished among Protestant readers far beyond the confines of liberal Boston. Poetry featured in popular print of all kinds, including religious periodicals, annuals, hymnbooks, and almanacs. This chapter describes the popularity of poetry; the influence of eighteenth-century scholarship, especially the work of Robert Lowth, that argued that the Bible was full of poetry; and the widespread use of the Bible as a subject in the poetry of Felicia Hemans and William Cowper. Considering the popularity of poetry opens an alternative narrative of Christianity in the early United States, which has been examined primarily in the contexts of revival and reform, politics, and theology.