Book excerpt: Magazines have long been a medium that both shapes and reflects the popular mind of Americans. This work provides profiles of some one hundred popular religious magazines currently or formerly published in the United States. Each sketches the history of a magazine and identifies its major focus, often through noting representative articles. Authors of the essays offer a critical appraisal of each magazine, assessing its contributions to popular religion and its role in shaping how ordinary men and women develop their own religious beliefs and perspectives. The essays will give users an understanding of the particular emphasis of each magazine, while the whole provides an overview of popular religious magazine publishing in the United States. This work focuses directly on those American religious periodicals, past and present, that are directed to a popular, general readership. Since the early Victorian era, periodical literature has served both to shape and to reflect the consciousness of Americans on many subjects, including religion. Hence, the purpose here is to provide a work that will introduce users to the range of popular religious periodical literature that has flourished in the United States. Some are valuable mostly for charting the development of the religious body that has served as the sponsoring agency; others provide insight into popular religious movements of their time. Some seek to promote personal piety and devotion; others serve as vehicles to gain adherents to a particular religious group or perspective. All offer important signals of the forces that have fashioned and continue to fashion the ways ordinary men and women go about the business of creating their personal religious beliefs and values, and, in many cases, how those beliefs make a difference in the public arena.