The end of April marks the close of the 2025-2026 academic year and CSR’s first “Month of Giving” campaign. As the publisher, I am grateful for the generosity of an anonymous party who provided CSR with a $10,000 matching donation. I am also grateful to all individuals who responded with gifts toward helping us meet our total fundraising goal of $20,000 this month. Thanks to the generosity so many of you exhibited, I am optimistic we will meet that goal. If you have not yet donated, I would ask you to please consider doing so by clicking this link.
In previous installments in this series of Christ Animating Learning posts, my editorial colleagues focused on “the why,” “the what,” and “the how” of CSR. As we close out this month and this campaign, I would like to focus on “the where” of CSR.
Thirty years ago, I had the good fortune to begin my career by serving as a residence hall director and lecturer at what was then Messiah College. While the internet existed, its influence was not pervasive enough to merit one attending to it. The college was beginning to issue email accounts. However, we could still avoid checking them, as no cultural consensus existed yet concerning why one would type a message when one could make a phone call.
The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Bloc dissolved, the United States and its allies apparently won the Cold War, and students were flocking to Messiah at that time at a rate that compelled them (and even their parents) to thank us when we offered them the equivalent of a wardrobe closet in which to sleep.
The best facet of the mid to late 1990s, however, is that cell phone usage was still so expensive that one only did so in the case of an emergency. If you wanted to communicate with someone, you could call them on a landline phone. Although long-distance rates were decreasing rapidly, no one questioned whether the best way to communicate was doing so in person.
Members of each generation long for a time that they idealize. For me, it was the mid to late 1990s as the values ordering my desires for communication seemed to match available means.
Along those lines, collecting physical mail was still a ritual in which all members of the Messiah community invested and did so daily by visiting a bank of mailboxes in the student center, so expansive that every member of the community had a box.
To the best of my recollection, Messiah offered no explanation why I received copies of a journal I came to know as CSR. Every quarter, a new issue would arrive in the mailboxes of all curricular and co-curricular educators on the same day. On that day, it then seemed as if everyone was reading CSR. For days and even weeks thereafter, I would see individuals and groups reading that issue in The Falcon (the campus grill which, before the global dominance of Starbucks, only served two types of coffee—regular and decaf).
As a young professional, I did what every other young professional did when trying to discern how to succeed—I imitated what seemed to work for senior colleagues I respected. Those colleagues read CSR, so I read CSR. Those colleagues discussed CSR, so I sought to identify opportunities to discuss CSR. Those colleagues wrote for CSR, so I aspired one day to write for CSR.
While I did not realize it at the time, one of the best things about CSR was “its where.” Every quarter, I received a physical issue. If I wanted to read an article in an issue that predated the growing collection of issues in my office, I wandered over to Murray Library, which included copies of all the back issues. With access to what seemed like an unlimited print and copy budget, I had ongoing physical access to any article I desired.
As members of older generations are prone to do, I could opine about and even lament the passing of facets of the good old days that no longer define how we order our days. If one thing was clearer in those days, however, it may be “CSR’s where.” Issues were physical, in our hands. When we finished reading each issue, we logged it on the shelves in our offices, optimistic that a time would come when we wanted to reference or cite something we read.
One could not find CSR on the internet. No searchable .pdf was available. Even individuals with access to what seemed like unlimited print and copy budgets only made copies of one article at a time. In essence, one knew where to find CSR because its physical existence was the only option available. Communities of colleagues that seemed long-standing to me as a new employee also formed around it.
With a critical mind’s eye, the good old days may not always be as good as one remembers. If part of what fuels nostalgia is a longing for simplicity, those days and the predictability of “CSR’s where” were certainly easier to identify and, in turn, navigate than the options before us today.
The reputation CSR established over its fifty-five-year history as the most prominent publication focused on the integration of the Christian faith across the disciplines is rooted in the quality of the refereed journal articles CSR editors and reviewers select for publication.
Of course, scholars who submit and, when we offer them the chance to do so, publish their work in CSR also play equally critical roles in fostering that reputation. Regardless of the topic, doing so is not easy for scholars, as one must possess an imagination capable of seeing the ways historic Christian orthodoxy intersects with facets of one’s discipline.
Thanks to the quality of the refereed articles published in the journal, “CSR’s where” grew exponentially over the course of the last 15 years. It began with a new webpage. Version 1.0 detailed what one could find in the print journal. Version 2.0, however, now allows for immediate access to what one can find in the print journal as well as an archive for the “Christ Animating Learning” posts and the “Saturdays at Seven” conversations.
With this post, the “Christ Animating Learning” posts currently number over 1,500. The 132nd “Saturdays at Seven” conversation, a conversation with Duke University’s Jeremy Begbie, was distributed last weekend.
Currently, fifty sponsoring institutions and numerous individual subscribers support these efforts. Despite the declines most historically print publications experienced since the good old days, these numbers are the highest in CSR’s history. The growth in available content is one way we sought to respond to that support.
Another way we sought to do so is by refraining from raising our fees for fifteen consecutive years. To demonstrate the significance of that commitment, the purchasing power of $1.00 in 2011 is approximately $1.47 today (or, in terms even I can calculate, a 47% increase). To the credit of our managing editor, Todd Steen, we also balanced our budget for each one of those years.
Most of the colleges and universities that sponsor CSR are no longer able to offer students the equivalent of a wardrobe closet in which to sleep and get away with it. On too many campuses, census day carries with it an anxiety that proves unprecedented over the course of our careers. CSR’s:
primary objective is the publication of peer-reviewed scholarship and research, within and across the disciplines, that advances the integration of faith and learning and contributes to a broader and more unified understanding of the nature of creation, culture, and vocation and the responsibilities of those God has created.
Such a mission cannot solve the financial challenges higher education is facing. Such a mission, however, can contribute to the cultivation of compelling communities of Christian learning that, in turn, can serve as a means of hope to a world in need.
As previously noted, CSR is striving to do its part during these challenging financial times by refraining from raising its fees for fifteen years. By also refraining from adding a paywall for its content, CSR also strives to be of service to Christian scholars and institutions unable to pay those fees. Doing so allows CSR to be a source of encouragement to Christian colleges and universities being established around the world. Perhaps CSR’s good old days may still be somewhere in its future.
Again, if you are feeling led to contribute toward this matching gift, your generosity would be greatly appreciated. We desire to continue to refrain from raising our fees. In addition, our desire is to refrain from imposing a paywall, allowing a growing, global circle of Christian scholars to access these resources at no cost. Your generosity makes those desires possible wherever one may find CSR.
