100 years ago this week, feisty Time magazine began changing the news game

Friday, March 3, marks 100 years from the first issue date of Time magazine, self-described as “The Weekly News-Magazine.”

The feisty New York-based newcomer brought journalistic inventions that redefined what’s news and how it’s presented. When Time and other Time Inc. magazines were up for sale in 2018, an article in the rival New York Times bade farewell to “the pre-eminent media organization of the 20th Century.”

Here is a very obvious point of disclosure and personal privilege: The Guy worked there 1969-1998 as a field correspondent and Religion section writer.

Looking back, the magazine’s 75th anniversary spectacle converted Radio City Music Hall across the street into a banquet venue and invited every living person who’d ever appeared on its cover. The Rev. Billy Graham, say hello to Joe DiMaggio. President Bill Clinton, meet Lauren Bacall. You get the picture.

The current ownership, however, is low-key about the centennial. But Time’s survival is noteworthy in today’s harsh environment for print media, albeit with reduced circulation, budget, staffing and publishing frequency.

Then there is another important angle about the impact of Time in the news marketplace. News flash: Religion makes news!

Missionary Kid Henry Luce was the co-founder, and Time carried a religion news section each week, alongside other specialized “back of the book” sections like Press and Law -- subject areas that many dailies only covered with depth decades later.

Attention-grabbing Time covers, coveted real estate for all fields, added renown to numerous religious writers and thinkers (e.g. C.S. Lewis, 1947), bureaucrats (Eugene Carson Blake, 1961) and activists (Mother Teresa, 1975).

Some readers may recall one cover in particular — the much-misunderstood black-hued “Is God Dead?” Holy Week cover in 1966, written anonymously (no bylines in those days) by John Elson. This talented scribe, a churchgoing Catholic, was not undermining faith but asking whether there were any limits to the era’s “theological strip-tease” among liberal Protestants and post-Protestants. That cover was, in other words, ahead of its time.

Memory eternal: What were the big ideas that drove the work of Chuck Colson?

As a D.C. Beltway power player, the late Charles W. Colson worked with a "Thank God it's Monday" attitude that meant his colleagues always knew they could contact him about hot topics and decisions.

But there was one exception -- visits by his autistic grandson Max.

"If Chuck was with Max, his phone was turned off," said Dave Carlson of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. "Max could stop him in his tracks."

This bond was rooted in a conviction that shaped the Nixon White House strategist's work after his 1973 born-again Christian conversion and guilty plea for Watergate crimes that put him in federal prison, said Carlson, who spent two decades as a Colson aide and editor. This same conviction led Colson to create the global Prison Fellowship ministry in 1976.

"It didn't matter if you were in prison or what kind of crimes put you there. It didn't matter if you were missing a chromosome or were autistic," he said. Colson believed "we are all humans made in the image of God -- Imago Dei. He was passionate about that until the end."

The 80-year-old Colson died on April 21, 2012, felled by a brain hemorrhage moments after a speech about rising threats to religious liberty. His colleagues marked the 10-year anniversary by rebroadcasting that speech during a BreakPoint radio commentary.

"What we're witnessing in our culture … is but the tip of the iceberg. It's the latest visible manifestation of a growing hostility towards Christianity mainly because -- this has always been the case -- government officials feel threatened by the power of the church because we all worship a king higher than the kings of this earth," said Colson.

Cultural issues are bigger than mere politics, he stressed.

"Elections are important. Whoever serves in office, it makes a difference what kind of person that is and what that person believes," he said. "But elections can't solve the problem we've got. The problem we've got is that our culture has been decaying from the inside for 30 or 40 years, and politics is nothing but an expression of culture. So how do you fix the culture?"