“One of the Most Crying Needs of the Present Time”: The Call for a Christian Daily Newspaper

Abstract

This historical examination of the decades-long call for a Christian daily newspaper in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries explicates the broadly felt desire for such a publication, and, in the process, it unpacks the tension between the sacred and the secular, revealing the efforts of a religious community of discourse—as it recognized the growing power of the press over public opinion and modern life—to confirm journalists as moral agents who would reconnect facts with values and to hinge the notion of social responsibility to the news ethic of daily secular journalism.