Two years. In the annals of recorded human history, two years is a speck, a blip on the historical screen: it took over a thousand years to build the Great Wall of China; decades for the ancient Egyptians to build the pyramids; 14 years to complete Mount Rushmore; over ten years for James Cameron to get Avatar to the big screen.
This month is the second-year anniversary for Religion Dispatches, which launched in February 2008. While RD has not yet reached the heights and scale of the achievements just mentioned, we are off to a surprisingly great start: over 2 million page views; individual stories that routinely reach thousands of readers; a newsletter subscription list that has grown every month we’ve been in operation; thousands of Facebook fans and a growing list of Twitter followers; and stories and writers that are increasingly linked to other media outlets.
The editors at RD want to celebrate our “cotton” anniversary by acknowledging with great appreciation our readers—many of whom claim they have given up reading the Chronicle, the New York Times, or Time when they sit down at breakfast in search of exhilaration. We also have to acknowledge one of the truly remarkable, and unanticipated sources of our success: the numerous writers—from academia, from journalism, from activist communities, from the art world, and from other arenas—who support us both by submitting exceptional material and becoming effective and vocal cheerleaders for this magazine.
Two years is not a long time, certainly not long enough to begin retrospective assessments about impact, influence, and innovation. But RD and the community coalescing around the magazine (not quite an “RDNation” but certainly something more than bathroom reading) have a lot to look forward to in the coming years. We will roll out a new design and logo in the next few weeks; increase the amount of multimedia offerings in the coming months; and have a really wild, swinging party at the American Academy of Religion next November in Atlanta.
Keep those cards and letters coming and remember, if the world is indeed coming to an end, Religion Dispatches is here to be your informed, accessible resource for insight, anticipation, and dare we say, hope.
The Editors.
