Meadville-Lombard Journal of Liberal Religion. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “liberal religion” it means what you probably think it means from the individual words: personally and politically progressive, free-minded, liberating. The antithesis of the religious right.

I’m happy to see their first edition published online, but like everything else they are honest about where they stand in society. Their momentum of the 50’s and 60’s waned along with so many great ideals of the period:

The world has not moved as Liberals hoped and expected it would. Fifty years ago, even twenty- five years ago . . . we felt we were the advance wave of a swelling tide that would roll mightier and mightier until it should cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. We confidently claimed the future for our own. But in these latter times the tide has failed to support us . . . the fact stubbornly stands that history has turned in a direction which is not ours.

I think the strength of the movement in the 50’s and 60’s may have set up a dichotomy where the other side strengthened its resolve to conservatism. Liberal religion may actually have more popularity now when people gradually become discouraged and disenfranchised by conservative churches. Liberal religions like Unitarian Universalism may be seen as a welcome, rational alternative rather than a bunch of crazy, new age hippies.