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Summary:
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From Pat Deveney's journal database: Religio-Philosophical Journal.
Devoted to Spiritual Philosopy / Truth Wears no Mask, bows at no Human Shrine, Seeks Neither Place nor Applause: She Only Asks a Hearing / Devoted To Spiritual Philosophy, Rational Religion and Psychical Research.
Other titles: The Philosophical Journal / The Religio-Philosophical Journal and Weekly Occult News
1865-1905 Weekly
Chicago, IL, and December 1898 on, San Francisco, CA.
Publisher: Religio-Philosophical Association, then S.S. Jones, then Colonel John C. Bundy. Editor: S.S. Jones, editor, J.R. Francis, associate editor; then John C. Bundy after Jones's murder on March 15, 1877; Mary
Elizabeth Jones Bundy (August 1892-December 9, 1893); B.F. Underwood (December 16, 1893-December 7, 1895); Thomas Gabriel Newman (December 14, 1895-February 28, 1903); J. Munsell Chase (March 7, 1903-February 6, 1904); W.T. Jones (February
13, 1904-April 15, 1905).
Succeeds: The Progressive Age Succeeded by: The Spiritual Republic (during 1867); The Mountain Pine
1/1, August 26, 1865-April 22, 1905. Newspaper sized, 8 pp. With the issue of May 31, 1890 (called 1/1 n.s.), the page size was reduced.
The journal was started by Jones and an association of dozens of the leading
spiritualists of the day and bought Moses Hull's
Progressive Age, presumably for its subscription
list.
The journal run until the latter part of 1866, when a revolution among the more radical shareholders of the Religio-Philosophical Association led to the ouster of the association's initial president, S.S. Jones. The faction that replaced Jones elected H.C. Child as its president and changed the name of the association to Central Publishing House. It stopped the Religio-Philosophical Journal at the end of 1866, and started the Spiritual Republic in its stead at the beginning of 1867. Jones's faction regained control of the group in August 1867, terminated the Spiritual Republic in September, and announced the re-appearance of the Religio-Philosophical Journal for January 1868.
After that, the journal was taken over by
Jones in his own name until his murder in 1877, at which time Col. Bundy, S. S. Jones' son-in-law, became editor for the journal's golden age.
On Bundy's death in August 1892, his wife, Mary
Elizabeth Jones Bundy (the daughter of S.S.
Jones, the founder of the journal) took over the
editorship, handing it over in 1893 to the old
freethinker B.F. Underwood (1839-1914), who was
editing his own The New Time: A Magazine of
Social Progress in Chicago at the same time. In
1895 Thomas Gabriel Newman (1833-1903) assumed
the editorship and eventually ownership of the
journal, renaming it The Philosophical Journal
(April 13, 1895-June 20, 1898), and then The
Religio-Philosophical Journal and Weekly Occult
News (July 7, 1898-November 10, 1898), returning
to The Religio-Philosophical Journal (November
17, 1898-July 14, 1900), and then ending with The
Philosophical Journal (July 21, 1900-April 22,
1905). In 1895, Newman moved the journal to San
Francisco, California,, where it became the
official organ of the California State
Spiritualist Association in 1898.
The Religio-Philosophical Journal was never as
popular as its larger competitor, the Banner of
Light, but it was far more representative of the
progressive side of spiritualism and is a better
source of information on the controversies that
roiled the movement in the period. Its masthead
was a graphic depiction of the progressive,
free-religious views of Jones and Bundy, showing
Harmonial Philosophy shedding its light on the
Bible, Koran, Zend-Avesta and Shaster, surrounded
by scenes of nineteenth-century progress
(steamships, balloons, telescopes, factories,
etc.). While the Banner of Light would only
reluctantly notice the exposure of fraudulent and
free-love mediums, and then usually in an effort
to exonerate them, the journal under Col. Bundy
believed in letting the chips fall where they
might, and carried on vendettas with the more
outrageous mediums of the period - and with H.P.
Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society. Like the
Banner of Light, practically everyone involved in
spiritualism and reform in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century wrote for or to the
Religio-Philosophical journal. Complementary
microfilms at NYPL and Newberry Library; LOC.
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