So, the Time magazine journalist who penned the famous “Is God Dead?” article in 1966 has shuffled off this mortal coil. It seems worth asking whether the kind of journalism John Elson practiced is gone with him.

From Time magazine’s cover you might have thought the article was a bit of bombastic provocation, the kind of writing you see littered throughout the blogosphere. But the article’s actual headline was “Toward a Hidden God,” and it was a scholarly, careful look at how secularism, urbanism, and all the other ‘isms were changing people’s ideas about God.

Here’s the New York Times’ description, “readers were guided through thickets of theological controversy and a shifting religious landscape. Profound changes taking place in the relationship of believers to their faith were often expressed through the words of people, both eminent and ordinary, grappling with the same fundamental problems. Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Billy Graham and William Sloane Coffin were quoted. So were a Tel Aviv streetwalker, a Dutch charwoman and a Hollywood screenwriter.

“More than 30 Time foreign correspondents were also involved in the project, conducting some 300 interviews to measure contemporary thinking about God around the world.”

Elson, who was “Catholic with a capital C and a small c,” according to his editor, labored on the project for more than a year. It’s hard to imagine any magazine giving a writer similar resources today.

And the cover query did it’s job, the Times reports: “The `Is God Dead?’ issue gave Time its biggest newsstand sales in more than 20 years and elicited 3,500 letters to the editor, the most in its history to that point.”

You can read the original article here.