The Journal of Christian Reconstruction (1974-1981)
I edited The Journal of Christian Reconstruction for its first 14 issues. These issues are now available here to read online or download as PDF's (recommended).
In late 1973, I recommended to R. J. Rushdoony that Chalcedon should publish a scholarly journal. He agreed, as long as I edited it. At age 31, I accepted the challenge. It proved to be more of a challenge than I expected, as most challenges do. Mobilizing academic authors is like herding cats.
I used the journal Daedalus as my model. Daedalus devoted each issue to one topic. This meant that the issues would stand alone as reference works, which I saw as a major benefit to readers and authors. Symposium articles in each issue would connect with the others. A typical scholarly journal is a hodge-podge of articles. Maybe only one article is remembered a year later. Maybe none. I wanted an entire issue remembered. Of course, this did not happen. Scholarly journals sit on library shelves, gathering dust. Anyway, they did before online publishing. On average, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thayer, the typical journal article is read by no more than a hundred people. He might have added this: 80% of these are read in the first month after publication. After that, they are forgotten unless an article gets cited by other authors. Very few articles are ever cited by other authors, and then hardly anyone reads these authors' articles. Except for getting tenure, publishing articles in scholarly journals is a waste of time. I did not know this in 1973.
These articles went down the memory hole. It is time to dredge them up again digitally. They are searchable by search engines. This will resurrect some of them.
These issues of the JCR are available online here. But these have been re-typeset. The pagination is no longer the same as the originals. Also, the footnotes are consecutive, first article to the last in each issue, so they do not match the footnote numbers in the original issues after the first article. For footnoting purposes, scholars need PDF's of the original issues. That is why I have supplied these PDF's.
These are the issues, in order of their publication.
Symposium on Creation (1974)
Symposium on Satanism (1974-75)
Symposium on Christian Economics (1975)
Symposium on Biblical law (1975-76)
Symposium on Christianity and the American Revolution (1976)
Symposium on the Millennium (1976-77)
Symposium on Education (1977)
Symposium on the Family (1977-78)
Symposium on Politics (1978)
Symposium on Puritanism and Law (1978-79)
Symposium on Puritanism and Progress (1979)
Symposium on Puritanism and Society (1979-80)
Symposium on Inflation (1980)
Symposium on Evangelism (1980-81)
Symposium on Social Action (1981)