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It was a dark day for many of us when re:generation quarterly (RQ) announced that it would cease publication. In its eight years of life, it had become one of the most thoughtful and provocative Christian publications anywhere. In 1997, Christianity Today named the magazine one of the "ten resources Christians need for understanding today's world." In 2000, Books & Culture editor John Wilson called it indispensable and unpredictable. The deck on that article called RQ "one of the best religious publications on the planet (that's not Christianity Today)."

Christianity Today wasn't alone in its praise. RQ won the Utne Reader's Alternative Press Award for spiritual coverage in 1999. The Utne Reader (now just Utne) also republished several articles from the magazine.

Utne described the magazine as one "liable to quote Henry David Thoreau as Saint Francis of Assisi and covers a range of contemporary issues from a progressive Christian perspective."

Progressive? Depends on what you mean. RQ was certainly intentional about representing younger Christians, but had little interest in heresy. It was the progressive Christianity of young Christians like Michael Horton. The magazine's editorial board looked suspiciously like the masthead of Christianity Today and Books & Culture: Michael Cromartie, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Richard J. Mouw, Richard John Neuhaus ...

Note the several Catholics there, along with the Orthodox Mathewes-Green. While the readership of RQ was mainly evangelical Protestant (albeit those sometimes uncomfortable with the term), the stable of writers was orthodoxly ecumenical. As Wilson noted in his 2000 column, tales of conversion to various branches of Christianity were common. More common, however, were articles taking the pulse (and sometimes the postmortems) of evangelicalism. Here again, however, the magazine was pleasantly surprising. Just when you start to expect a smug slam on smug evangelical leaders, you get slammed for being smug yourself.

The subject matter was just as unpredictable. One of the magazine's last articles was a travel/history/memoir about the legendary priest-king of the Orient, Prester John. Essays by Lauren Winner examined the forgotten notion of class and religious studies at the University of Virginia.

Even if you never read RQ, you probably have a better sense of it than you know. Its longtime editor, Andy Crouch, is now a Christianity Todaycolumnist and serves on the editorial board of Books & Culture. Those who can't get enough of Crouch's bimonthly columns in CT can fill themselves on his RQ archives, which include such gems as "The Violence of Evangelism."

One of Christianity Today's most popular recent articles of 2003, a profile of Hugh Hefner, was actually an RQreprint. (If you enjoyed the article, be sure to read "Small Worldview," a similar profile of Walt Disney. A third profile in the series by Read Mercer Schuchardt, on McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, was scheduled before the magazine died.)

Schuchardt's reviews were keen (see his comparison of Cast Away and Joe Versus the Volcano), but RQ rejected the common notion that a Generation X magazine had to focus on media and pop culture. It regularly paid attention to the hard sciences, something many other Christian magazines only touch when talking about evolution or abortion (important issues, but the scope can get rather limited). See, for example, Albert Louis Zambone's article on David Gelernter, "Technology As If the Incarnation Actually Happened." Or Catherine Crouch's "The Strangely Relational World of Quantum Mechanics." Both appeared in The Best Christian Writing series, edited by Wilson.

Wilson assures us that the death of RQ had nothing whatsoever to do with the decision to publish The Best Christian Writing books biannually rather than annually. But few who ever encountered RQ would deny that American Christians who like to read and think are poorer without it.

Fortunately, elements of the magazine live on. For one, CTLibrary.com now has most of the magazine's back issues available online. More will be added soon. And while Crouch's role with Christianity Today continues to expand, other RQ writers have created an online magazine called The New Pantagruel. There's more brash anger than RQ ever had, but it's worth checking out (especially now that The New York Times has christened it as a kind of 2004 version of National Review).

Also worth noting: Next weekend (May 27-30), "younger" Christians (Gens X and Y) will gather in Vail, Colorado, for the annual gathering of The Vine, once closely tied to RQ. It's no coincidence that The Vine's mission, "to promote relationships among diverse leaders to build unity in the body of Christ and engender cultural renewal," is remarkably similar to RQ's old purpose statement: "to equip the emerging generation to transform their world by providing commentary, critique, and celebration of communities and contemporary culture." RQ's "core conviction" was that "communities of Christians, in many forms, are the paramount resource of transformation in their neighborhoods."

The community of RQ readers has disbanded. But we're honored to offer you its artifacts, which can still help to transform our world.

Ted Olsen is online managing editor of ChristianityToday.com.