Wednesday Photo: The end of the Hibbert Journal
This picture was taken only last Saturday in the Common Room of the Cambridge Unitarian Church hall amidst the chaos caused by the need to fix the building’s one hundred-year-old central-heating pipework. It shows the end of the Hibbert Journal which was subtitled A Quarterly Review of Religion, Theology and Philosophy. The bright yellow coloured magazines in the lower far right of the frame are the editions from 1968, whilst to the left and above (all the way to the ceiling on two more, full shelves) are the earlier editions, stretching back to the first in 1902. The slow decline from being a journal with great national and international influence to non-existence is, I think, poignantly echoed in the image.
Whilst the Hibbert Journal was never a Unitarian publication per se, it was started and edited by important Unitarians, most notably, Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (1860–1955), and it consistently explored issues of central concern to the liberal, Unitarian tradition.
Because I’m currently thinking very hard about how the Cambridge Unitarian Church might be able re-vision itself in ways genuinely relevant to both twenty-first century knowledge and needs (see for example HERE and HERE) rather than simply go out of existence, it’s perhaps not surprising that this image of the Hibbert Journal’s decline into non-existence caught my eye . . .
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